Linux Printing: Still Awful After All These Years

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 09:28:33PM -0400, phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org wrote:
> It's my impression that many aspects of the Linux Installation Experience
> have become much more pleasant over the years. For example: no more manual
> partitioning or formatting! Network recognized instantly! Package
> management at the touch of a button! (Almost) No configuring video cards!
> No tweaking X-Window!*
> 
> The one thing that doesn't seem to have changed is printer installation.
> My Suse 9.2 printer installation was a nightmare and Ubuntu 7.1 seems much
> the same. (In both cases the Samsung printer had to be spoofed as a
> Laserjet to ork.)

So don't use crappy unsupported hardware.

> So, is printer really difficult or am I missing something? Would someone
> like to give a TLUG tutorial evening on the different ways of connecting
> and driving printers?
> 
> Now please excuse me while I take this giant pile of printer paper,
> generated during a printer debugging session, to the recycling.

Installing my printer under Debian was in fact less work than for my
wife installing it under windows (and the printer came with a driver for
windows).

It autodetected the printer type by USB identification, and all I had to
do was click OK, and give it a name.  Once that was done, the other
linux systems on the network saw it too with no extra work involved.
Good luck with that part on windows (Mac OS X works the same was as
Linux which is just awesome).

In my case I run debian unstable (so very up to date at all times) and
the printer is an Epson R260.

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