[TriLUG] Good budget priced inkjet for Linux?

[Roy Vestal]

Ooooh! Good idea Chris. Duh, CUPS seems to work beter with IP printing to Windows boxen.


On Fri, 11 Apr 2003 19:22:29 -0400
Chris Hedemark <chrish at trilug.org> wrote:

> 
> 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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