[Wylug-discuss] Printer recommendations wanted...

[Jim Jackson]

On Thu, 24 Mar 2011, Jim Jackson wrote:
> Thanks for the recommendations everyone. First I'll take the top off and 
> look for any obvious problems. I'll look up all the printers people have 
> recommended (some came direct to me with the list being Cc:'ed), viz
> 
>  HP B109n  HP7180   HP Officejet 6500   Canon Pixma iP4600

I decided on the HP 6500a Plus - my wife got sold on the photocopy 
facility :-)

Just for interest, I managed the printer installation completely from 
Linux. I'll just summarise here, 'cos it wasn't trouble free.

I am running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (yes, I ought to upgrade). 
After setting up the printer hardware, connecting up by ethernet,
putting an entry in my DHCP servers database to allocation a fixed 
IP add, I ran hp-setup and discovered the HP6500a plus wasn't
supported in the version of hplip installed.

Over to the hplip webpage...

  http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/index.html

and down load the latest hplip.

Make the downloaded  hplip-3.11.3a.run file executable and run it, it's a 
script. It needs to sudo some commands, so you need to enter relevant 
password for the script when asked.

It said there were 5 missing dependencies, and tried to install them.
Problem is some of the package names were wrong in the script so it failed 
to install them...

  libcups2-dev  should be libcupsys2
  cups-bsd      should be cupsys-bsd
  cups-client   should be cupsys-client

I types 'n' to retry the installs.

In another shell I installed the, correct, packages.
There were also warnings about failing to remove old packages - ignored.

Everything completed ok. There's a time out of 300secs on the scripts 
invocation of hp-setup, so I had to run that again to discover and install 
the printer into cups.

Upto now the printer control panel seemed stuck on a "discover more" 
screen.

I ran hp-toolbox, and played around, then opened a browser on the printers 
web interface (direct from the browser, or an option in hp-toolbox).
I set a password on the printer and set the correct time, checked network 
settings and made sure wireless and fax were off, set a hostname, and by 
now the printers screen became "unstuck" and the printer started behaving 
more as expected.

So far all seems to be ok. Now to get it working with Windows XP :-)

cheers
Jim

> 
> Thanks for the pointers, it will get me started.
> Jim
> 
> On Thu, 24 Mar 2011, Jim Jackson wrote:
> 
> > 
> > My printer, an HP Deskjet 990c, is beginning to play up - "ink" light 
> > coming on and refusing to print[1]. It has served me well since 2002 and 
> > has had a fair bit of use, my wife works from home.
> > 
> > Anyone recommend a robust small office printer mainly for b/w printing but 
> > also ok for colour photo prints, that plays well with Linux.
> > 
> > cheers
> > Jim
> > 
> > [1] yes I've tried new cartridges!
> > 
> > 
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> > 
> 
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