[SLL] Color laser printer for Linux?

[John Locke]

Jay Scherrer wrote:
> I have found that HP has been very friendly with Linux and CUPs 
> drivers. I have successfully set up my HP - office jet pro L7650 Which 
> handles: Fax, Two sided full color printing, Network, usb, Scanning, 
> with scan to network  (Samba) or memory devices directly plugged in. 
> Cost was less then $350 at Sam's Club. However this is not a laser but 
> a ink jet model.
HP makes an open source utility for managing their printers/scanners, so 
I'd say it's a pretty safe bet. Install the hplip package from your 
community repository of choice, and you'll get everything you need, 
including a GUI for setting up and managing the device. The printer ends 
up installed in CUPS, the scanner is visible in sane, everything just 
works. On my Ubuntu desktop, I even get a little notification in my tray 
when the ink gets low.

If only they would support their laptops for Linux as well as their 
printers. We've gotten a couple HP laptops in the past year... the first 
one we had a lot of trouble with the Broadcom wireless card, having to 
use ndiswrapper at first. Now the fwcutter stuff seems to work, but that 
laptop's wireless is a lot more flaky than the rest of them here. When I 
went to pick up another at Frys a couple weeks ago, all but one of the 
HP laptops still used the Broadcom chip. The only one that had an Intel 
chip was a display model they only had one of!

Printers seem pretty easy these days. We hooked up a network-attached 
mammoth copier/scanner/printer/fax at a client a while back, a Minolta 
or something like that. Zero issues hooking up to Linux--the device 
provided IPP and LPR in addition to its Windows client--it was actually 
easier to get all the Linux machines in that office printing than the 
Windows ones. There were also instructions specifically for setting up 
printing from Linux--it seems the manufacturers actually care these days 
about Linux compatibility. There may be a few makes that don't, but it's 
been years since I've had any trouble hooking up printing from 
Linux--the most difficult thing I've had to do in the past couple years 
was update CUPS to get drivers for a new printer on an old Linux 
workstation.


Cheers,
-- 
John Locke
Freelock Computing
http://www.freelock.com
P.S. We're hiring PHP developers...