2006-08-21
I Usually Hate Printers
Printers suck. Printing sucks. I hate it. I have always especially hated it with Linux. It was always a stretch to get a working printer and usually they had to be the higher end ones that were nice, but cost a fortune. At work we've gone through a lot of printers. They break they are finicky. I hate them.
At home we had this Canon. It printed so nice. The colors were really rich and it did full bleed printing and had a flatbed scanner. We didn't print that much so we figured it would last a long time. Nope. Turns out not printing a lot allowed the heads to get all gummed with crap and that was the end of that. There was a special solution you could buy to clean it but from reports I read it was a pretty big waste of time.
The one printer that worked, at least marginally, was a Brother MFC that was at my office before me. We've had to replace all the standard parts but it printed and faxed for over 5 years. After the Canon met the dumpster we looked around and picked up a Brother MFC-7220. It's only black and white but most of what we need it for is for printing papers for Jacey's classwork. I hooked it up to the windows workstation and was done with it.
So now I'm trying to be more energy conscious and my workstation is idle most of the time so I have it going to standby or hibernate. Jacey does not like that. It logs my user out, the printer isn't available and it's a pain for me. I looked at Brother's site and sure enough: Linux drivers! One of the easiest installs I've ever done. I installed their RPMS, I had to use '--nodeps' on one, and plugged it in. SUSE automatically detected it and setup the CUPS queue. Beautiful.
Since this is a multi-function I wanted to try the scanning as well. They provide a SANE backend and it installed just as easy. I setup the 'sane-port' service and downloaded ScanImage and I had some scans! I am mighty impressed at the strides all of this open source software has taken in the last few years.
So the Brother is only black and white. When I bought my desktop it came with a free printer, a Lexmark Z705. I knew Lexmark had added a lot of Linux support for their hardware but figured this free model was low-end enough that it was a lost cause. I was too pessimistic! Of the few models they do support this is one! I haven't set it up yet. Maybe soon though.
At home we had this Canon. It printed so nice. The colors were really rich and it did full bleed printing and had a flatbed scanner. We didn't print that much so we figured it would last a long time. Nope. Turns out not printing a lot allowed the heads to get all gummed with crap and that was the end of that. There was a special solution you could buy to clean it but from reports I read it was a pretty big waste of time.
The one printer that worked, at least marginally, was a Brother MFC that was at my office before me. We've had to replace all the standard parts but it printed and faxed for over 5 years. After the Canon met the dumpster we looked around and picked up a Brother MFC-7220. It's only black and white but most of what we need it for is for printing papers for Jacey's classwork. I hooked it up to the windows workstation and was done with it.
So now I'm trying to be more energy conscious and my workstation is idle most of the time so I have it going to standby or hibernate. Jacey does not like that. It logs my user out, the printer isn't available and it's a pain for me. I looked at Brother's site and sure enough: Linux drivers! One of the easiest installs I've ever done. I installed their RPMS, I had to use '--nodeps' on one, and plugged it in. SUSE automatically detected it and setup the CUPS queue. Beautiful.
Since this is a multi-function I wanted to try the scanning as well. They provide a SANE backend and it installed just as easy. I setup the 'sane-port' service and downloaded ScanImage and I had some scans! I am mighty impressed at the strides all of this open source software has taken in the last few years.
So the Brother is only black and white. When I bought my desktop it came with a free printer, a Lexmark Z705. I knew Lexmark had added a lot of Linux support for their hardware but figured this free model was low-end enough that it was a lost cause. I was too pessimistic! Of the few models they do support this is one! I haven't set it up yet. Maybe soon though.
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