Ubuntu to run my printer

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 13 June 2014 22:30:19 Douglas Pollard did opine
And Gene did reply:
> I am tired of my printer cartridges drying out and having to but new
> ones. Is their an ubuntu program that will run my printer in a Nozzel
> cleaning Operation at some preset interval. They got the darn things
> fixed so if a single color dreis out you can't print in back and white.
> That is aggravating.

Vote with your wallet.  Brother makes a very nice B&W laser printer for 
just over $120 USD. $200 will get you the printer & a spare drum/toner.  
It will do around 2000  pages on a toner.  HL-2140 or its successor.

Or, for color work, you might find an HL-3170-CDW for $299.  Toners/drums 
are about $90 a color, and it will tell you when its time to replace one 
but has not refused to print without it.  Seems to do around 2500-3000 
pages before it needs a toner.  Color is good, darned good on good paper 
with my only fuss being the reds are about halfway between the Epson red 
which is truly excellent, to the nearly orange "red" HP is fond of.  My 
color vision can readily see the difference, but its been calibrated by 20 
years of running my own color darkroom in the last century.  Picky IOW.

You have to look for them, but Brother DOES have linux drivers.  The only 
fly in that soup is that when a firmware update for the printer itself 
becomes available, you have to go find a winders machine to do the update.

For me thats a pima as I have to haul it to the tv station to do it, the 
neighbor's winderz boxes couldn't find the printer when I hooked it up.  
Thats a 60 mile round trip.

I did, for quite a long time, have amanda printing its nightly backup 
report, one page on my home 3 machine system on an epson NX-515, but soon 
realized that while it did keep the nozzles fairly clean, I was still 
using about $350 worth of cartridges a year.  So its now turned off till I 
need to scan something, its scanner works very well on linux with xsane.

Overall, the laser prints at about half the cost per page that an ink 
squirter can.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
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