[OT] Selling Some Computer Stuff on E-Bay

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Mar 15, 2006 at 02:06:31PM -0600, Sy Ali wrote:
> I'm interested in learning more about why this printer won't work
> under Linux.  I've been doing some research on printing under a
> specific distribution[1] and the brother printers are getting rather
> confusing and mixed reviews.
> 
> [1] http://jrandomhacker.info/Printers/PCLinuxOS_printer_research

Well my experience with Brother printers is that some claim HP laserjet
such and such compatibility, but if you try and use them as such you
discover the margins are different so your edges get cut off, and other
stupidities.  To me Brother == Junk.  I have still not found out why the
Brother fax at work can't just let you punch in the number and hit start
and have it deal with the dial, connect, send, etc with a stack of pages
in the feeder.  My dad's panasonic does that just fine.  The brother
seems to want you to hit offhook, enter number, wait for connection,
then hit start, and hope it works, or you get to do it all again.

I suspect some newer brothers are doing similar things to some canon and
others, making GDI printers, which are ram on a usb interface and a
command interface to dump the page in ram to the drum.  THey have no
rendering engine or printer language at all.  The driver has to render
the page with fonts and all in software wasting you nice CPU and taking
a lot longer to transfer to the printer too.  Of course inkjets all seem
to do the same thing now, but at least most of them do have a more
efficient protocol for transfering the data to the printer after it is
rendered in the driver.

Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml