So I have this draft of an blog entry sitting in my wordpress for ages… One time i distracted and never finished it. But today people were talking about printing in #linux and decided I’d share a good overall linux/windows/OSX printer with a laser beam on it’s freaking head.
My friends always complain how much printing sucks in Linux, and I admit it’s pretty shitty, but I’m of the opinion that it’s pretty shitty in windows. Ever have a document you press cancel, and it dosen’t cancel… You press purge, all other documents purge, but it’s still in the windows print spool… You reboot, it’s still there. You turn of your computer overnight, it’s still there next time you turn it off. I can’t tell you how many times that’s happen to me on windows. To fix it, it requires some kind of voodoo with the proper sequence of reboots, turning the pinter physically off, canceling the document, purging, often many times for each one. And then if your combination is right, and the alignment of the planets is right, it just might work. Same thing for cups.
In fact I’m of the opinion that printing sucks in general on all operating systems. I haven’t used OSX a lot, but i know it uses cups so I know for a fact the printing sucks as well. You say, but my pretteh osx does everything out of the box some awesome everyone should one an apple machine; my friend Aaron told me a different story a while back about trying to get OSX cups to talk to Linux cups.
What’s worse then printing to local printers? Well network printing.
But enough with ranting, about 6 months or so I got a Brother network laser printer, HL-5250DN. I bought it for about $150 after like a $50 instant rebate my fam had at Costco. Why did I buy it originally, three reasons.
- It was a laser printer.
- It was a network printer.
- It supported duplex.
Anyways so far it’s been all smooth sailing. Plugged the printer in, it automatically set it self up with dhcp. I fixed up my dhcpd/bind setup to give it the ip address that was assigned to the “brother” dns entry, based on it’s mac address. Since then it was smooth sailing. Setting it up on windows on windows machines my family uses was a breeze, pop the cd in set it up and off we go printing. Setting it up on linux was even easier, in a few seconds cups or gnome/cups/configuration caplet found the printer and I was able to print, pretty nifty (this was on Ubuntu dapper). But for detected it as an older model, so not all the features were available, so I removed the auto detected printer and proceeded to add a new printer, set it up as a network jetdirect printer, with the hostname brother, pressed next, clicked on the install driver button, put the CD that came with the printer, found the ppds that were ment for windows, clicked next, and I had everything I needed installed. Including all the features that printer supported.
Now the nice thing about the printer is that all of it’s configuration tools are available over a built in web server including various random, yet handy statistics. For printer methods it supports this:
- Jetdirect
- Ipp
- lpr
- samba(natively in the printer)
- ftp — so you can upload ps files to it (haven’t tried pdfs)
- and email (so you can email things to your printer)
- and parrel/usb for you that don’t believe in the series of tubes
Besides that it’s got other goodies, like mDNS/zeroconf/avahi or whatever you call that auto discovery protocol now adays. It’s got IPv6, and SNMP which my friend Forgue would love. It’s basically like a really sweet office printer at consumer prices. And I haven’t even mentioned half the features.
If i was to sum up this printer in 3 words it would be: best printer EVAR!
