Printing in Linux

I recently got myself a nice new mono laser printer with duplexing capabilities. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a good deal on a simple mono laser printer that has duplexing built in? You would think at this point that with all the effort going into selling color laser printers, the market in mono laser printers could be kept alive better if all the manufacturers would simply include duplexing. All the "green" people love that sort of thing, because it saves paper. And frankly, I like the convenience of spending less money by using half the paper I would normally use. Plus I'm a nerd: I print out forms from this site and use a fountain pen.

Anyway, I searched and searched, and almost bought a used one on Ebay, because I badly wanted an HP printer this time. In the end, I chickened out on the used printer and the HP ones were just out of reach budgetwise, so I wound up getting a Lexmark E250d.

You would think in this day and age that you really wouldn't have to worry about whether or not your printer is supported in Linux. I mean, come on: Linux printing is now standardized on CUPS (Common Unix Printing System), so all the manufacturers have to do is supply the consumer with a PPD file and you're good to go. Especially a big printer manufacturer like the formerly IBM-owned Lexmark.

Well, the good news is that Lexmark does indeed support Linux, but they want you to install their own printing system! And they have some kind of CUPS compatibility layer which is supposed to make the printer work through CUPS.

As usual, my distro (Mandriva Linux 2008) was not supported, but I'm used to that. Mandriva was originally based on RedHat, and still closely follows RedHat's layout, so commercial applications that are meant to run on RedHat usually run just fine on Mandriva (I tested this years ago with WebSphere many times over). So I jumped in and installed Lexmark's printing system via the supplied RPM.

I went through their configuration screens and configured the printer and the queue through their Java-based wizard. I then went into OpenOffice and attempted to print one page with one word on it. Boy, was I excited when the printer fired itself up and then--

Page after page of PCL code began streaming out of the printer, starting with a banner page proclaiming "this print out came from rsezov@enterprise!" (As an aside, I name all of my computers after stuff in Star Trek. My machine is always enterprise; my server is ds9; my old laptop is nx-01; even my Windows XP virtual machine is named, um, Garbage Scow). In a frantic effort to get it to stop (the machine came with no manual explaining what the pretty lights on the front mean), I yanked out the paper tray and then started jamming my thumb repeatedly on the button marked X.

Well, that seemed to stop it. First off, why in the world would anybody want to print a banner page any more, especially if I'm the only one using this printer? I mean, banner pages were cool in, like, 1993 when you enabled printer sharing on Novell Netware. Since then, I've never worked in any office that has used that feature, no matter how many people were sharing any particular printer.

Ok, what next? I went through the wizard again, making sure that (even though I had done this before--because obviously if you do the same thing twice, it's going to work better the second time, right?) I checked the box that allowed PCL pass-thru on CUPS, because, well, this was recommended. I could never find any option for turning off the banner page. Well, we'll deal with that later. Ok, fire up OO, print--

Ack! Here it goes again! Time to buy stock in paper companies, especially when I purchase a new printer.

Ok, one more time. This time I will do something DIFFERENT. I will NOT check the PCL pass-thru box. Fire up OO, print--

Buried in paper again. This is ridiculous! What insanity came over the Lexmark engineers when they built this piece of horrible software? Did they really think they were going to be able to support Linux in this way?

In the end, I deleted the printer and the queues and removed all of Lexmark's software. I then went into Mandriva's really nice control center and allowed it this time to autodetect the printer. Smirking at the button labeled "Install a manufacturer's supplied PPD driver," I chose the HP 5 Si driver and enabled duplexing. Now it works like a charm.

Note to self (and others): if you intend on using a printer with Linux, make sure when the manufacturer says it's supported that you find out if they supply a CUPS driver with the printer. And always choose a printer that's compatible with some sort of standard, such as PCL or PostScript. That way you can always fall back on using a different driver that supports the standard.

Now I am happily printing. The hardware on this machine, at least, is great!

Blogs
nice... somehow even before I read the end of this I knew you would end up using an HP driver. Hahahahahahaa.....