Hardware Advocacy or Making it easy to do the right hing.

[Tommy Trussell]

On 2/27/07, Chris Puttick <cputtick at gmail.com> wrote:
> For laser printers, look at Samsung and use the Splix driver
> http://splix.ap2c.org/ - their printers fall firmly into the
> affordable category (it's a specific target market for the Samsung
> behemoth) and are good printers (I have had two, currently a CLP510N).
>
> The Splix project develops at a meteoric pace, so the two printers
> currently not supported I expect will be shortly.

Thanks for the recommendation. Unfortunately my typical sources didn't
have Samsung models with the features I need presently. (Copier
function, especially.)

By the time I received your message a couple of days ago, I had
already narrowed what I was looking for and decided to risk buying a
Brother DCP-7020 multi-function copier/printer.

I had no difficulty installing Brother's linux drivers for i386
Debian. (They are much harder to FIND than to install.) Then I was
challenged by a CUPS remote printing difficulty, but that's resolved,*
so printing is working fine. Eventually I will see if the scanner
works in linux, but that will require moving things around.

*Here's the difficulty -- the Brother printer needs a driver, which
they supply for linux, but for i386 only, so I couldn't use it on my
PowerPC system running Ubuntu. (I have the Brother printer attached to
a throwaway Pentium PC running Dapper.) Fortunately CUPS is "magic,"
so if you tell the client system that the remote printer is a generic
PostScript device, CUPS does all the conversion automagically and
printing works fine.