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24 Comments
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14At this point, I simply don't understand why these manufacturers are so hesitant to develop drivers for the Linux/Free Software platform. CUPS is a relatively stable target to build a driver against (unlike the Linux kernel, which could change the day after you release your driver), and there is plenty of reference material out there for them to drum up a driver in no time.
You would think that these manufacturers would _want_ their printers to be used more often by people in the Free Software world. More people using their printers means more people buying their highly expensive ink cartridges, which means they stand to be more profitable. Even binary drivers like delivered for other platforms would be better than no drivers at all.
That being said, I still use a 8 year old HP inkjet printer with one great feature: it prints beautiful color documents. And it's been supported by Linux for as long as I've been using Linux. HP has done a great job in keeping their printers going on every OS, and if you get an older one, they're built like tanks, they can survive drops off desks, kids shoving crayons in them, even a girlfriend spilling coffee down inside it. If you're thinking about going Linux, I'd definitely suggest finding one of these printers; they may be old, have only one feature, but they do that feature beautifully, and the ink is about the cheapest among the rest of the printers out there (unlike new printers where the printer costs less than the ink to fill it.. then again that's true of my printer now, the printer only cost me $10, the ink's roughly $25). - baalzebub, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5http://localhost:631
- mooninite, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Canon has CUPS support. Google for their Japan FTP server and download the driver. It works great with my Canon i860 printer. It even gives you the GUI for the options that you get with the Windows driver. Although... it would be nice for Canon to put native support out there like HP does.
And in reality... there's nothing to be done for Linux printing. This article is BS. - bllambert, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I have a Cannon mp360 and can print in Ubuntu. I use the bj600 driver. Its not pretty though. The entire page is compressed into the top left quadrant of the paper. I cant find a way to make it print on the whole sheet. Something is better than nothing though. Like most other users, I use Linux for its strengths, and unfortunately, printing is not one of them.
- bigtrouble77, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Is it a multipass canon printer? If so, OSS drivers do exist and should come with any modern distro.
- BlackAdderIII, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"Actually printing on linux is WAY better than on windows"
Yeah, I've been working with CUPS (and windows printer sharing too) for years, and frankly I find it MUCH less quirky and error-prone than windows' network printing - on networks with windows clients on them, I never share the printers through Samba, always CUPS, because once it's set up, it tends to keep working.
I also don't buy the idea that loads of printers are unsupported - there are various reasons (printer corps using unix, universities/libraries using unix, gimpprint) why there are zillions of printer drivers available, pretty much all of which come as standard with, say, SuSE.
I'm not buying that UNIX printing is crappy, and been working with networked printers on/from linux and windows for years.
..incidentally, HP MFDs tend to work perfectly, because Hewlett Packard, who are a unix company, make unix drivers for their printers. - msgyrd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"but at least my ***** expensive all-in-one device WORKS and works 100%"
And we all laugh at you for having purchased your Lexmark plastic *****. Did the salesman at BestBuy sell you a 3 year warranty also?
Linux works fine for almost all hardware if you buy quality products. Yeah...I research my purchases to ensure success, but it's not terribly difficult, maybe half an hour of research on Google. I bought a cheap HP all-in-one ($70) device but researched it before I went to the store. Wanna know what I did to make it work? Plugged it in and selected my model on gnome's "Printer" app. I also didn't buy something I didn't need. I wanted a cheap printer/scanner, that had reasonable ink costs, and didn't take up an entire corner of my room.
Don't be a retarded consumer and linux won't treat you bad. Buy from companies who make quality products and respect their customers. If you just buy the most expensive thing you see because it has 2 dozen features, you deserve whatever headaches you receive. - BlackAdderIII, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"Not to mention the fact that CUPS is also the printing back end for Mac OS X, so presumably if people are developing drivers to run on Mac OS X, they would be simple to compile to run on Linux as well.
Maybe the issue is that Linux itself is not a stable platform. A binary for one linux distro won't necessarily work on another."
Yeah, that should be a real problem in the case of printer drivers and cups, *sigh*.
Once again, the position seems to be:
(i) Apple lift software/drivers straight the hell out of Linux or BSD, then
(ii) Apple fans/windows trolls claim the Linux/BSD version is inferior to the Apple version because they don't realise that.
Happens with a lot of software and utilities, that does. I guess that's what happens when people that went to art school/no school try to be technology trolls.
The smart Mac users, or users of anything don't do this. - tuffy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Setting up a bunch of Windows machines in my office to use a networked HP JetDirect printer was such a hassle I wound up piping all of the office printing through Samba and CUPS on my Linux workstation and haven't had any trouble since.
I'm sure Windows' printing is fine in the usual "one printer per computer, with drivers disc" configuration, but I've had better luck with Linux once one gets outside the norm. - vuke69, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Actually printing on linux is WAY better than on windows, especially in a business setting. You dont have to set up printers on every new PC, CUPS just automatically finds every queue on every server on your network, and makes them available to you.
And if you add a new network printer, all you have to do is plug it into the network, and cups will find it all by itself. All you have to do is click on one button on the cups web interface to add it as a new print queue on your server.
And drivers, who needs em... 99% of the printers than any business would buy just plain work out of the box. We use HP, Ricoh/Savin, and Dell/Lexmark printers, about printers 50 total, and I have never had to download and install a driver. I did however download a ppd from linuxprinting.org for a brand new Ricoh CL3500N, for no particular reason, but the CL3000N one that was already included worked perfectly. - barbobot, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2my HP printer works here, was easier to set up than on windows. http://hplip.sourceforge.net/
- aAnaRchY, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"mooninite" I have the Cannon i865. The quality of the printouts that i made it's not so good as it were in windows. Also i will like to know if you can print on Cd's. Thanks
- AngryPenguin47, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I was cursing CUPS for the longest time because my printer would work in it then one day it just stopped working. After a really long time I installed another printer and it worked flawlessly, the old printer was just dead, R.I.P. hp deskjet 3820.
- starsky51, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1i realise pabster is trolling but he may have a point. If these companies could make a profit from writing cups drivers, why wouldn't they?
- drag, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1As a Linux user this is what your just going to have to do to get good quality printing easily.
Get a HP or Epson Printer, or get a higher end printer.
Avoid Lexmark, Brothers, or Canon printer like the plague.
The thing is is that printers shouldn't require driver, technically. But printers are cheap so manufacturers strip out all the hardware and software out of the printer and turn them into a 'dumb' printer. This is much like 'real' modems vs 'winmodems'. The 'drivers' are pretty much software emulation of the hardware that would otherwise come with your printer.
HP has very very good Linux support and has it's own set of open source drivers for their printers. The HPLIP and HPIJS.
For the differences see their FAQ:
http://hplip.sourceforge.net/faqs.html
These drivers should be included by default in your system. Using the latest versions with a high quality HP printer will provide as good as or superior printing quality then any other operating system.
Epson is next best in terms of support, but will provide the features nessicary for photo professionals for mature drivers. You can read the gory details on this page:
http://linuxprinting.org/suggested.html
Now scanners are closely associated with printers. I find a HP multifunction to be sufficient for what I do, however if you want a non-cheap-as-dirt scanner check out SANE's webpage and you can find a list of supported scanners. http://www.sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html
SANE is a bit odd compared to Windows and OS X scanning, both which use 'TWAIN' system. The GUI isn't so much different (plugin for gimp, like a twain plugin for photoshop), but there are technical differences. One of the cool things about SANE is that it supports network scanning, which isn't realy possible with twain. Also there are twain-sane backends for OS X and I beleive Windows so that twain-knowing applications can use this. So this opens up the possiblity for using Linux as a scanning controller for a workgroup, much like you can for printing.
Of course nowadays there is support for ICC color profiling in Linux which has been being improved in the past year or so. There is even now support for One or Two USB calibrators for your Monitors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_color_management
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/OpenIcc (ICC itself has gone open source)
http://lprof.sourceforge.net/ (handy dandy app for doing color profiles in Linux)
So this sort of stuff is getting better, not perfect of course.. but nothing is. - msgyrd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1They develop drivers for Mac, and it's arguable that they have approximately the same number of desktop users as Linux. Why not develop for Linux? Especially since the gap between Mac and Linux is much smaller than the gap from Windows.
Also...some hardware companies don't write drivers for Linux, but they don't stop it. Other companies go out of their way to make writing your own drivers near impossible by breaking industry standards, releasing little or no hardware documentation, or releasing crippled or broken drivers on their own in light of anything useful. - drlha, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4Not to mention the fact that CUPS is also the printing back end for Mac OS X, so presumably if people are developing drivers to run on Mac OS X, they would be simple to compile to run on Linux as well.
Maybe the issue is that Linux itself is not a stable platform. A binary for one linux distro won't necessarily work on another. - theehman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I have a Canon S600 which is getting old and I have to print everything in "High Quality" or else it gets blank lines across the page. Unfortunately, Ubuntu doesn't give me the option of high quality printing so I still have to go back to XP for all printing. I guess I could buy a new printer but I really do like the S600.
- JQP123, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0"Maybe the issue is that Linux itself is not a stable platform. A binary for one linux distro won't necessarily work on another."
That coupled with issues such as support and associated legal obligations. The potential market share/revenue may not justify the expense. All things considered, why not let the Open Source community do their own development? - BlackAdderIII, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2"Freeware" - if you mean closed source software at no charge (that's what it's meant for the last 16 years, anyway) - is not something you should expect to find a lot on Linux.
If anything, apps which are freeware on OS X or windows are more likely to be FOSS on Linux. - pabster, on 10/12/2007, -9/+6Printing sucks in Linux, like everything else.
Bitch about Windows (and Vista) all you fanboys like, but at least my ***** expensive all-in-one device WORKS and works 100%, without endless hours of driver hacking and jake-rigging just to get the printing functionality half-way working. - geodescent, on 10/12/2007, -6/+3I don't use Linux full time because I can't wirelessly print through a Samba share as easily as Windows.
- pabster, on 10/12/2007, -7/+3Would you invest hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) creating drivers and software for an operating system that only 5% (or less) of your audience is even using?
- thecheat1, on 10/12/2007, -9/+2This is the reason that I'm not running Linux right now. I couldn't get my Canon multi-function to print properly. There was only ONE set of drivers that I found after like months of searching that would make it print decent and they were charging $30 for it! Uh...freeware?? It IS Linux after all....
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