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Linux printing: much done and more to do (Linux.com)
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Linux printing: much done and more to do (Linux.com)
Posted Nov 10, 2006 17:16 UTC (Fri) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link]
Am I the only person who thinks that printing on Linux is far superior to printing on any other operating system? I can plug practically any USB printer into my Linux computer and have it Just Work immediately. With both Windows and MacOS I need the manufacturer's bloated driver disks. On Windows I'll be screwed if I forget to install the driver before plugging in the USB cable. By comparison Linux printing is miles ahead.
Linux printing: much done and more to do (Linux.com)
Posted Nov 10, 2006 17:48 UTC (Fri) by eklitzke (subscriber, #36426) [Link]
When I last had a printer (about a year ago) printing worked fine in Linux. Except the quality was nowhere near as high as it was under Windows. Apparently the Linux drivers only had basic printing support, and to be able to print at different qualities required more advanced functionality from the drivers that was only available in the Windows drivers.
As a result, printing things always resulted in washed out text. I have had a similar experience helping a friend get her printer working under OS X -- she had the Gimp print drivers for the printer installed, and while they worked fine insofar as she could print her documents, the print quality was very poor. It may be true that more printers work out of the box in Linux, but unless you have a high end printer that can directly understand Postscript, the drivers you are using will probably not be that great.
Linux printing: much done and more to do (Linux.com)
Posted Nov 10, 2006 20:53 UTC (Fri) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]
I would have to disagree with this. A little research before buying a printer goes a long way--check linuxprinting.org for which manufacturers truly support CUPS (since that is what a lot of distros use these days) and you should be fine. You don't need hardware-supported Postscript; Ghostscript does just fine (especially the 8.5 series, which is now GPL.)
Linux printing: much done and more to do (Linux.com)
Posted Nov 10, 2006 21:09 UTC (Fri) by tetromino (subscriber, #33846) [Link]
That depends on the printer. On a Lexmark E210 bw laser, I get much better print quality in Linux than in Windows (I think there is a bug in the Windows driver that breaks the high-resolution mode, but since the printer is out of production, Lexmark has no incentive to fix their broken code. Which, btw, is one obvious example of the advantage of open source drivers.)
Linux printing: much done and more to do (Linux.com)
Posted Nov 10, 2006 23:34 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
I like to point out on every story that I see Linux printing being mentioned at that you realy realy want to avoid any inkjet printers other then Epson or HP.
Hp is preferable due to the nature of HP's open source projects. Setting up one and getting Printing, Scanning, and Fax is relatively painless. Most of the time nowadays you only have to plug it in.
Epson is what you'd get if you need to have special features to get the best image quality possible.
Generally you want to avoid things like Canon or Lexmark.
See the 'suggested printers' page at Linux-printing.org for more details.
Linux printing: much done and more to do (Linux.com)
Posted Nov 12, 2006 2:19 UTC (Sun) by NapalmLlama (guest, #26327) [Link]
I paid about £70 for my Canon about a year before I upgraded to Linux. It's now next to useless.
What really adds insult to injury is Canon's strapline - "You can". No, I can't, because you won't let me have drivers!
Linux printing: much done and more to do (Linux.com)
Posted Nov 13, 2006 15:47 UTC (Mon) by wjhenney (subscriber, #11768) [Link]
I paid about £70 for my Canon about a year before I upgraded to Linux. It's now next to useless.
But just think of all the money you are now saving on ink cartridges :)
Seriously, the yearly consumible costs for a low-end inkjet are often higher than the initial cost of the printer itself. So you wouldn't be seriously out of pocket if you bought a new one.
Linux printing: much done and more to do (Linux.com)
Posted Nov 12, 2006 20:01 UTC (Sun) by nkoozer (guest, #5553) [Link]
Even for HP there is no way to tell which models will work correctly until you try them. If you already own 25 different types of printers, the chances are that some will be ok. If you have to shop for a printer, there's no way to know. Foomatic is useless in this matter; my HP ink jet is listed in Foomatic as "works perfectly", but it makes a garbage mess out of the printing. At my house the summary is still "Linux does not have printing".
Linux printing: much done and more to do (Linux.com)
Posted Nov 10, 2006 21:45 UTC (Fri) by TxtEdMacs (subscriber, #5983) [Link]
jwb - I had similar experiences, perhaps even more extreme than you describe.
When my daughter's Epson C-86 Color Stylus printer was pushed aside for part of the summer upon re-installation the printer began to develop problems. I allowed her temporarily to use my Epson 880 that had been functioning fine on Linux machine. Later when I restocked color cartridges, I added all new ones to the C-86. Immediately, it became unusable. Again I passed over my Epson 880. This time the 880 failed suddenly and completely. I could not believe the 880 could die so suddenly without any sign of its degrading. Nonetheless, I received reassurances that was the way stylus printers went.
[Installation/configuration 880 was a problem, but nothing compared to what is described below.]
Again temporarily I passed on my Samsung ML-1710 b&w laser printer to my daughter. This time installation was a nightmare, mostly due to my not being able to locate the driver disc. The installation procedure seemed too to follow a differing sequence each time I ran it. I finally got the laser printer functioning on XP as an older model: 1210. On earlier Linux distributions I had to use that driver, so I knew it would work. My problem, when it came time to selecting a driver the selection window on XP did not always have the 1210 listed. Well it worked and it sufficed in the interim.
I took the 880 and reattached it to the Linux box - it worked fine. Feeling vindicated, I tried to get the C-86 working. It appears to work, but no ink is visible on the pages. The repair manuals are no longer available on the web, having been withdrawn by Epson. I suspect a few replacement consumables might have put the unit back into service. But that is not an option, hence, neither are ink jets, bubble jets, stylus, etc.
I ended over buying a mid-range (networkable) Samsung color laser printer. Since I subsequently found the 880 worked I really did not need to use the new printer. If you consider buying a color laser, look very carefully at toner cartridge capacities, and energy consumption. Some manufactures are beginning to play the game of making back their money on selling over priced, low capacity consumables. Moreover, some models pull extreme levels of power on startup and even in the wait state are more like a working cpu than a printer at rest. It may be cruder electronics are cheaper and easier to build saving the manufacturing expense, however, your electric bills will reflect your poor choice.
Later I will probably put the color laser on the LAN. I hope by then the Linux driver will have improved to at least match the current Windows version.
Linux printing: much done and more to do (Linux.com)
Posted Nov 10, 2006 17:29 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
The article seemed a little innacurate though. Back in the dark days of LPR PCL printers were theeasiest to support and ghostscript could RIP to it from PostScript. CUPS has done a lot to make
printing more reasonable, better than most systems, and was also picked up by Apple as the
standard system for Mac OS X which helps a great deal in ensuring proper support for the most
devices. There are plenty of CUPS based print servers out there and plenty of Mac and Linux
workstations that use them. Manufacturers do respond to an installed base.
What would be nice if Windows supported IPP properly. CUPS has these nice IPP broadcast
messages so that only the host that is actually connected to the printer needs to know anything
about it, everything else just automagically sees it and can print to it. This works _great_ on Mac
and Linux, but not on Windows. In my house the one Windows laptop is always having printing
trouble, where the Linux and Mac hosts have no problems unless the printer is turned off 8^).
Unfortunately printing is still a PITA in practice, although CUPS has made it better overall.
Linux printing: much done and more to do (Linux.com)
Posted Nov 10, 2006 19:57 UTC (Fri) by sjj (guest, #2020) [Link]
Now if somebodies would fix the sound systems.
Linux printing: much done and more to do (Linux.com)
Posted Nov 11, 2006 1:35 UTC (Sat) by Junior_Samples (guest, #26737) [Link]
Darn good point!
ALSA is a mess. I am unaware of any canonical definitive guide to ALSA. There is, however, a huge incoherent mish-mash off half-finished and/or out of date "readmes" and "howto" guides.
ALSA is the poster child for how not to do open source software. It is complicated, unreliable embarrassment to the Open Source community. The committee which designed it should hang their heads in shame.
On the other hand, the OSS sound system which preceded ALSA was simple and reliable for what 99% of the community wanted to do. But ALSA was written for the 1% who are audio hobbyists with a craving for the novel and peculiar.If there ever were software which cried out for a good O'Reilly opus (i.e. not one of their "quicky" hacks), it is the ALSA sound system.
Linux printing: much done and more to do (Linux.com)
Posted Nov 11, 2006 4:14 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
I will admit that I don't understand ALSA and don't know anyone who does, or good documentation,I think ALSA works better in almost all cases than the OSS drivers. When both were under active
development I found that ALSA had better hardware support, also I've found ALSA drivers to be
more reliable and work consistanly across several different kinds of audio hardware where each OSS
driver is its own unique entity with different options, different supported input and output formats,
etc. Sometimes it seems that for things to work each application needed to know about the special
quirks of each OSS driver to get things working in an optimal state.
That's how I remember it anyway, I haven't used OSS drivers in years and haven't had any ALSA
related troubles.
Linux printing: much done and more to do (Linux.com)
Posted Nov 11, 2006 5:17 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Definately. Except for a certain number of sound cards Alsa is much better.
The difference between Alsa and OSS is that Alsa is designed to handle advanced features of modern hardware were OSS it has to be hacked into individual drivers.
I think that Alsa's problems are much more due to a lack of manpower rather then any sort of technical defficiencies.
Linux printing: much done and more to do (Linux.com)
Posted Nov 13, 2006 1:03 UTC (Mon) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
I should introduce you to some folks who have written code on both sides of both interfaces, like Alan Cox and Zach Brown. Strangely both of them believe that OSS is the confusing, inconsistent, hard-to-use mishmash of the two.
That said, i find the .asoundrc corner of alsa to be pretty unpleasant.
My thanks go to ESR
Posted Nov 10, 2006 22:47 UTC (Fri) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]
Many thanks to Eric Raymond for raising concerns about the terrible state of Linux printing.
Excellent read
Posted Nov 11, 2006 12:52 UTC (Sat) by vblum (guest, #1151) [Link]
My printers have now worked well for such a long time (in terms of drivers that is) that I had almost forgotten the little bit about the CUPS adventures. Very well pointed out.
I, too, learned at one point (on SUSE Linux) that you had to edit /etc files to get anything done, OR ELSE know about the special CUPS loging that allows you to do something about (say) a printer that is falsely advertised as unresponsive.
Sometime in 2004, the KDE Printing dialogue started to address this issue (NOTE not SUSE's YAST) but to this day I still can never remember which password I am supposed to type.
Let alone the joy of guessing how to add a printer using YAST (SUSE 9.1 for that matter) - or not SUSE's YAST (Lexmark's Intensely Intellectually Proprietary PPD File comes with its own separate installer).
Which original intellectual achievement is it that makes those PPD files so special, by the way? Does anyone know? It's kind of like patenting a specific combination of settings in a GUI that was written by someone else, no?
Thanks for the inspiration!
Posted Nov 11, 2006 16:51 UTC (Sat) by rogerd (guest, #4170) [Link]
After many fruitless trips to linuxprinting.org, I got inspiried to try to set up a few printers one more time. I easily got Yast to print to the network printers around here by leaving off the '\\' in front of the shares. Doh!
Then I found:
http://www.linux.com/howtos/Debian-and-Windows-Shared-Pri...
This bit of magic got my home printer going --the guest user does not require a password.
/usr/sbin/lpadmin -php890 -v smb://guest@192.168.0.5/HP890C -P /usr/share/cups/model/manufacturer-PPDs/hplip/HP-DeskJet_890C-hpijs.ppd.gz
Thanks...
Linux printing: much done and more to do (Linux.com)
Posted Nov 14, 2006 12:51 UTC (Tue) by tom.parkin (subscriber, #38175) [Link]
I don't tend to use printers much, so my experience is limited; but I remember working in an office a year or so back where the only machine that could talk with our networked HP printer was my Linux laptop.
All the other folks running XP had to email me their documents, and I'd print them out ;) Happily they managed to track down a working driver after a week or two: in the meantime we were happy to have something that "just worked"