Printing under Ubuntu

[Daniel Mons]

Dave Hall wrote:
> I have a HP Officejet J5780 which works well - with FOSS drivers bundled
> in ubuntu.  It priced at around $180+ on staticice.com.au (comparison
> shopping site).

This topic comes up frequently on this and many other mailing lists, and 
the answer is generally the same:

HP are the way to go.  They have made an enormous commitment to writing 
and releasing first-party FLOSS drivers for an enormous range of their 
printing, scanning and multifunction devices.  Most of these are 
included with a default Ubuntu install, and the rest can be installed 
easily via your package manager (hplip, hpijs and hpoj are the three 
important ones I think).

It's worth noting that the printing backend of MacOSX is CUPS (indeed, 
Apple now own CUPS after purchasing it from Easy Software Products last 
year, and are funding it's development entirely).  Printer manufacturers 
that support CUPS are immediately supporting Linux, MacOSX and a wide 
range of UNIX and BSD systems as well.  HP understand this, and have 
chosen a smart business path by releasing a great deal of their printing 
and scanning software drivers for free.  They are the defacto choice for 
  many businesses that use both FOSS and Apple Mac software for these 
reasons.

-Dan