[TriLUG] Good budget priced inkjet for Linux?
Chris Hedemark
chrish at trilug.org
Fri Apr 11 19:22:29 EDT 2003
On Friday, April 11, 2003, at 03:57 PM, Robert Floyd wrote:
> What suggestions do the folks here have?
I'm going to answer you in a sideways fashion. You asked about
hardware, I'm going to tell you about software first.
There are multiple print spoolers around these days. CUPS is quickly
becoming the standard, with major OS's like Red Hat 9 and Apple OS X
shipping with CUPS as the standard print spooler. I'm not going to
gush over all the great things CUPS has going for it right now. I'm
just going to gush about one thing: drivers. I've found that often the
Linux drivers that are available for most printers are lacking in
features. But the Windows drivers can fully exploit the capabilities
of the printer.
In many cases, you can take the Windows postscript driver for a printer
and extract the .PPD file from the driver set. The PPD file is what
CUPS uses as a printer driver.
The place I sysadmin at does two things really well... one of those two
things is printing lots and lots and lots of stuff. I'm talking like
filling several tractor trailers a day easily. I put a CUPS server in
place there to handle bulk printing and it is working flawlessly. Use
it with confidence.
Now, with that out of the way, you don't have to worry about the
half-ass drivers that are out there for many printers in Linux.
Instead look at Windows Postscript support and see if you can download
the drivers for the printer you want & extract a PPD file.
One good place to go for finding a community-based list of supported
printers is http://www.linuxprinting.org/suggested.html
For desktop or small office use, I like Lexmark printers. For bulk
printing, check out Xerox. Make sure the printer you buy supports
Postscript.
More information about the TriLUG
mailing list