Printing finally works!

[Paul King]

Hello

I wish to share the good news that printing finally works on my Edubuntu
system. I have had to deal with a wireless printer (A Brother MFC 640CW)
that has essentially been a paperweight in Linux, even with the Linux
drivers provided by Brother. 

Ok, so it is still a paperweight. But I have been able to print on my
wife's colour laser (an HP2550) for which no Linux driver exists that I
know of. I just set it up using Ubuntu's "system-config-printer.py"
script and it all seems to "kind of work". The printer runs on a Windows
XP system, so it looks as though I am essentially using the Windows
drivers to post-process the documents to the printer.

I have not had the time to shoehorn printer services into my system, and
I am glad there was a quick method to make use of my existing printer
services. There was a time years ago when I would have done everything I
could to get it to work, because I had the time. As for the MFC printer,
print jobs get sent and as if it was carrying on the grand old tradition
begun by Bill Gates: it happily accepts my job, then doesn't print it,
and doesn't report any error. Even more to this tradition, I believe
last time I checked that Ubuntu thinks that the "device is working
properly". It's pretty sad, frankly.

But at least I have now given myself one less reason to use Windows.

Paul

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