Michael Comperchio wrote: > What would be the best choice in inexpensive printers for use with > Fedora? I'm relatively new to F10, though I've used Linux before. I'm > hoping to never have to boot to the windoze side again. But printing > and the inability to sync up with my Palm Lifedrive are the major > holdups for that. I can probably live without the Livedrive...but I do > need to print I'd recommend HP, because the CUPS drivers (HPLIP) are Free Software, written by HP themselves and included in Fedora (so they work out of the box). /!\ Please check on the HPLIP website http://hplip.sourceforge.net/ that the printer you're about to buy is supported and that it doesn't require the binary-only "plugin". There are third-party Free Software drivers for most of the "plugin"-using printers, but there are patent issues (JBIG compression, mainly), which is why HP is not willing to support them in HPLIP without that binary-only "plugin" and which also means those drivers are not included in Fedora. (They can be found in RPM Fusion though, they're the foo2xxx drivers, where xxx is one of zjs, hp, oak etc.) One drawback though is that HP is not the cheapest option out there (especially if you count the ink/toner prices - for example, HP inkjets have the print heads on the cartridge, which means they're less susceptible to defects, but which also means the cartridges are very expensive; and of course the cartridge/toner prices also subsidize the printer to some extent, something to watch for all printers, it's a common pricing tactic of printer manufacturers, not just something HP does), so if you find an inexpensive printer which is well-supported by Free Software drivers (check http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/OpenPrinting ), you may get a better deal, especially as price is important to you (but again, always be careful, a cheap printer might turn out really expensive when facturing in the cartridge/toner prices). But you have to check for driver support for the particular model *before* buying, the rate of success with some manufacturers is much lower than with HP. Manufacturer drivers are often binary-only, those are not included in Fedora and often don't install properly (I've also read horror stories about proprietary printer drivers opening up huge security holes to bypass the POSIX permissions system). So check for support within GhostScript or Gutenprint, don't trust what the manufacturer claims. Kevin Kofler -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
