[ubuntu-uk] Recommendations for a printer? HPLIP

[alan c]

On 04/01/12 09:32, Alan Pope wrote:
> On 04/01/12 09:24, Simon Greenwood wrote:
>> I'd have to second that. I bought a HP Officejet 6500 All-in-One a few
>> months ago and it's been a joy to use: both printing and scanning work
>> pretty well out of the box. The only caveat that I would add is that I
>> use it as a network printer only and plugged into my ethernet network so
>> can't testify to its use as a USB device.
> 
> I have mine connected via USB and to the network. I did a clean install 
> on my desktop PC and some time later switched on the printer. It was 
> ready to print in seconds. I didn't have to faff about with drivers or 
> anything, it just automagically detected the printer and worked.

I also would favour HP at first, regardless of other factors, because
of their close relationship with the FOSS drivers. The wrapped drivers
package I think called HPLIP is installed in Ubuntu by default, or so
it has seemed to me anyway. However a problem I have found, via a
novice friend who went out and and bought himself a new (end of line)
all in one HP printer was that the regular updates in Ubuntu do not
seem to pick up the latest HPLIP by a long way. This meant that my
novice but stolid friend found it did not work in Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS
(updated) and was then in conversation with the given support phone
number (HP) for long conversations. As I discovered later, he had
downloaded the latest HPLIP, manually, multiple times within the
support conversation (7 times I think!) but he had not been able to
successfully complete the subsequent instructions,  until the HP
support politely gave up saying they did not really support Linux on
that line. Kudos to them to persist that long!!

Removing the old HPLIP in his Ubuntu and installing the new one
manually was not difficult for me but it was way above my friend.
However if the HPLIP was kept more up to date in the repos it would
have gone along easily and probably automatically.

-- 
alan cocks
Ubuntu user