Ubuntu to run my printer

[Douglas Pollard]

On 06/14/2014 12:10 AM, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Friday 13 June 2014 22:30:19 Douglas Pollard did opine
> And Gene did reply:
>> I am tired of my printer cartridges drying out and having to but new
>> ones. Is their an ubuntu program that will run my printer in a Nozzel
>> cleaning Operation at some preset interval. They got the darn things
>> fixed so if a single color dreis out you can't print in back and white.
>> That is aggravating.
> Vote with your wallet.  Brother makes a very nice B&W laser printer for
> just over $120 USD. $200 will get you the printer & a spare drum/toner.
> It will do around 2000  pages on a toner.  HL-2140 or its successor.
>
> Or, for color work, you might find an HL-3170-CDW for $299.  Toners/drums
> are about $90 a color, and it will tell you when its time to replace one
> but has not refused to print without it.  Seems to do around 2500-3000
> pages before it needs a toner.  Color is good, darned good on good paper
> with my only fuss being the reds are about halfway between the Epson red
> which is truly excellent, to the nearly orange "red" HP is fond of.  My
> color vision can readily see the difference, but its been calibrated by 20
> years of running my own color darkroom in the last century.  Picky IOW.
>
> You have to look for them, but Brother DOES have linux drivers.  The only
> fly in that soup is that when a firmware update for the printer itself
> becomes available, you have to go find a winders machine to do the update.
>
> For me thats a pima as I have to haul it to the tv station to do it, the
> neighbor's winderz boxes couldn't find the printer when I hooked it up.
> Thats a 60 mile round trip.
>
> I did, for quite a long time, have amanda printing its nightly backup
> report, one page on my home 3 machine system on an epson NX-515, but soon
> realized that while it did keep the nozzles fairly clean, I was still
> using about $350 worth of cartridges a year.  So its now turned off till I
> need to scan something, its scanner works very well on linux with xsane.
>
> Overall, the laser prints at about half the cost per page that an ink
> squirter can.
>
> Cheers, Gene Heskett


  Hello Gene,  I bought a Brothers HL-2240 printer new with $60 off so it cost me $59.oo at Staples on line a great deal. Spent much of the evening trying to get the Brother driver installed and working. It seems I only use the terminal to install drivers for printers and I forget how in between printers  :-)    Anyway I guess with a lot of trial and error I will get the printer to work today. I almost never need to print in color and if i do on a rare occasion I will go to  Copy Cat or someplace and pay them to print it. If a single cartrige quits in my Epson printer I need to go to Best Buy or Walmart and buy four cartriges at a cost of over $50.00 just to get it to print in Black and white. I am just not going to do that. Printing is not that important to me.
-- 
      Doug Pollard
Albin Vega Sea Legs 2225
          KK4YGO