printers for UBUNTU?

[Brian McKee]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 6:19 AM, Dotan Cohen <dotancohen at gmail.com> wrote:
>> elmo wrote:
>>> which printers are OK for ubuntu  and which should be avoided.?
>>>
>> Well, as others said there are essentially three alternatives, you can
>> choose from:
>>
>> ==HP
>> ==HP
>> and
>> ==Hewlett-Packard
>>
>
> That is rather pessimistic. Anything postscript-compliant should work
> for basic printing. More advanced functions (two sided printing, for
> instance, or ink levels detection) will need specific drivers, though.
>
> Most non-Lexmark printers on the market today are
> postscript-compliant, and the ones that aren't postscript-compliant
> will print things wrong in many cases (on both Linux and Windows), as
> document formats such as PDF and Word (which is designed for creating
> documents for print, by the way) actually use postscript functions or
> mimic them internally. Therefore, if a printer won't work in Linux, it
> will likely print things wrong in Windows as well.

At the risk of defending Lexmark - they're network printers are most
certainly compatible as most of them do Postscript and IPP natively
(along with many other standards, e.g. IBM mainframe stuff etc etc).

I'm disappointed they stopped putting out CUPS ppd files for some
reason and instead came up with their own 'custom' printing
application - but it's most certainly linux compatible (albeit clunky
and ugly)

Me, I take the Win2K PPD files, dump 'em in CUPS and they work top drawer.

Brian