[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.




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