Linux in Italian schools - five months later

Posted Feb 2, 2006 14:59 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Most printers are going to work if they are proper printers and can take postscript.

With lower-end consumer style printers (think winmodems) produced by Brothers, Lexmark, or Cannon they are generally NOT going to work. Most HP and Epson printers will work, especially with HP stuff... but even then it's hit and miss sometimes.

This isn't so much of a problem for businesses as they get nicer printers generally, but for normal users it's very frustrating.

If you run down to the local walmart or office store and randomly buy a printer for under 150 dollars I figure you have about a 20-30% chance of having it work in linux without major headaches.

"AFAIK, there is no CUPS UI (except for the web interface) as such. What you see is either KDE or Gnome add-ons."

Exactly. CUPS is system software, not so much desktop software.

On OS X you still have the web-based CUPS ui perfectly avaible and fully functional. (at least in 10.2.x series and I expect up to 10.4.2 were its disabled, but still aviable), but 99% of Apple owners (even fairly advanced ones) are not going to even realise that that it even exists! This is because they don't have to know it exists.

They even use the same pdd files time to time and use the same text-based configuration files that Linux does. They even can use gimp-print (now gutenprint) to get higher quality drivers then those that are provided by the printer vendors themselves. This is all stuff that was developed for Linux systems that is superior to what would otherwise be aviable for OS X.

Don't think I am a OSX lover though.. I still prefer Linux despite printing issues. (like I noted before I have virtually no use for printing outside of work)

"Don't know about Koffice, but the rest you mentioned are NOT using CUPS natively - this is the real problem. Each of the above implements a (more or less) dirty wrappers around the century-old printcap/lpr stuff. Personally, in all such apps that at least allow to define an alternative to "lpr" command, I use gtklp. This helps resolving 99% of printing issues. I wish there would be as nice a distro-independent CUPS configuration utility as well."

I agree with you 100%

It's hilarious that when you go into Firefox and try to print on Linux you still find items like this for the printer preferences:
lpr ${MOZ_PRINTER_NAME:+'-P'}${MOZ_PRINTER_NAME}

That stuff is insane.