[TriLUG] Printer Decision Made - Scanner help requested.

[Matt Pusateri]

Triluggers,

Thank you to everyone that responded when I was asking for printer
recommendations.

I have not been a big fan of HP products(inkjets) as of late, although
they probably have better Linux support than other vendors.  Anyhow I
had had an epson inkjet before and was happy with it, so I decided to
give epson another go.  Since my scanner broke, I have been looking at
PSC/MF printers.  I found the Epson Stylus CX6600 at Best Buy for $199
less $50 Mail in Rebate (MIR)from BB and Epson also has a $50 MIR, so
it brings the price down to $99. I also had a $20 rebate card, so the
printer should end up only costing me $79. The printer has a
scanner/copier function as well as a  card reader in it.  The printer
has an
interesting feature that allows you to copy right to the card reader
without the computer, kinda a neat feature although I don't know how
much I will use it.  The one downside is that there is no LCD screen
to preview pictures, but I didn't want to spend the money for a
printer with an LCD just so we could print directly from the card.  I
figure we mostly just upload pictures to snapfish and usually have to
edit/crop or clean them up anyhow. Plus I just don't see us printing
from the CF card directly to the printer.  My wife doesn't like the
quality of digital pictures printed on an inkjet, so for me it was a
waste to spend more.  Plus I didn't want to have a ton of $ invested,
because I really want a color laser.

Supposedly the CX6600 is the same as the CX6400 just without a USB
cable in the box.  Big retailers wanted to be able to sell the USB
cable seperately.

Since I have 14 days to get the printer working or take it back, I
have done the following.

FreeBSD, cups would print a test page, but I couldn't get any app from
gnome to print.  Not sure why, buy I got annoyed and had space on the
HD so I installed Ubunto.

Ubunto worked fine with the gimp-print drivers with cups.  And
recognized the card reader fine as well.  Didn't get to configure the
scanner as I found RPM's on Epson's JP site and then decided to try
CentOS instead.

Loaded CentOS and the gimp-print/cups drivers work fine.  Although I
havn't been able to get the Epson JP site drivers to work.  Also
sometimes it seems as though it doesn't know the print job has
finished.  The card reader is detected fine and when you insert a
card, and gets automounted and GtkThumbs asks if you want to import
the photos.  So that all kind of works.  I haven't got the scanner
working yet, the scanner RPM's from epson didn't work and it was too
late last night to tinker anymore.  A quick google check seems to
indicate it is possible to get it to work.

If anyone has any tips on getting the scanner to work I would
appreciate it.  I have to decide soon if I am going to keep the
printer or take it back.  If I can't get the scanner to work, I have
to decide if I still want to keep it, for the $79 I have invested it
still wouldn't be that bad.


Thanks for letting me ramble.

Matt