An Ubuntu Friendly Printer Recommendation.

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 1:14 PM, David Sanders <dsuzukisanders at gmail.com> wrote:
> The vast majority of HP printers have really excellent driver support,
> as well as being very well engineered.
>
> http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/index.html

Um. I feel that this misses a number of rather important points.

I have had to install HPLIP recently. It is /not/ easy - indeed, it
completely baffled 3 or 4 of the Linux techs in my company. OK, all
but 1 are rookies and the remaining guy is not a godlike genius just
yet, but he's learning blisteringly fast - but it defeated all of
them. It has multiple dependencies and on Ubuntu - only the world's
leading distro, you know, so nothing major or important - it is not
capable of resolving its own dependencies.

I did it, by identifying about a dozen packages that I had to manually
install first, taking a lot of disk space & adding significant
complexity to the OS. All the development system, for instance.

I documented the process here, FWIW:
http://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/18419.html

The minimum requirements to install it, AFAICT, were:

ubuntu-dev-tools
python-all-dev
libcups2-dev
libusb-1.0-0
libusbdev
libtool
libcupsimage2-dev


But that is a minimum install with most things not working. Then a
load more bits are needed to get the GUI and so on:

python-qt4-common
python-qt4-dbus
python-reportlab
xsane
libsane-dev

There was no readme, no instructions, no help, no information. I
couldn't find this list anywhere on the web.

This is not an easy installation and a tool that can't do this stuff
itself is not a good or an easy tool!

-- 
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