[tlug] Printers for linux, was: refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Kalin KOZHUHAROV writes:
 > On Tue, Dec 24, 2013 at 9:34 AM, nigel barker <nigel@example.com> wrote:

 > > I find Epsons are often in gutenprint.

But not all of them, by far, not even rather old ones.  And the
drivers are typically incomplete.

 > My EP-802A at home seems to work (scary!), I think I messed up with
 > some proprietary drivers when I got it. I use it once a few months,
 > so I am always worried that it will stop working after some
 > upgrade.

Yeah, HPLIP screws me one in three upgrades.  Epson doesn't, any more
-- because there aren't upgrades for my printer any more. ;-)

 > still not all). The funniest part is that all the logging I get on
 > error is "NG" (as opposed to "OK") on the printer panel; cups is
 > happy and says it send the job fine...

CUPS is the AKB48 of essential utilities in my experience: can't sing,
can't dance, can't act -- but it has a pretty face.

 > A long time ago "PostScript-enabled" was a must for linux,

Eh?  You must be talking about pre-0.99.14 days.  Sure, CUPS may be
nice for the 99% of humanity that doesn't know why 10 + 10 = 100, but
is it really that hard to type "gs -dDeskjet file.ps | lpr -pDeskjet"?
(In fact, until CUPS stole the command, I used a shell function so
that I could do "lp file.ps", and of course gv was configured to DTRT
from the File menu.)

 > but I hear these days that this usually is a software (requiring
 > Windoze), not a "add-on card" it used to be... is it worth it?

You need to check whether there's a driver for it (Gutenprint, CUPS,
Ghostscript sources) that enables the features you want.
Unfortunately, this requires actually testing the beast (or finding
somebody in a forum who did or communicating with the driver author).