First off, let’s clarify the title is simply an expression of my personal experience. There was a time way back in the days of RedHat 6.2 when it worked really well. That was before CUPS and I had an old Epson dot-matrix. The setup was simple, the drivers worked, and I got what I wanted. Further, the product was character-based, instead of graphical rendering. That’s what those printers were designed for, and graphical document rendering was always pretty poor.
Since then, it’s never worked well for me. I realize CUPS has allowed for a unified driver platform, but I find it’s uniformly shaky. I never had trouble with the old LPRng doing crazy things and spitting out reams of gibberish characters, scattered a line or two on one page, and many pages. In CUPS, it happens a lot. This afternoon I did some more testing, thinking maybe I’ll get it to work. Not.
Surely there are some mismatches in hardware and such, but that wasn’t an issue when I tested the machine under XP. Drivers are always dicey in Linux when the hardware manufacturer won’t play nicely. Such is life. At any rate, my Panasonic KX-P2123 isn’t doing that well. The KX-P1123 works much better, which is crazy because that one is much older. The HP Deskjet 5440 was a wreck. That is, if I used the hplip tools, it was pure trash. I tried every permutation possible, read the documentation, but all I got was pages of gibberish. If I simply set it up directly under CUPS, it was okay on the test page, but missing lines of ink once I tried to actually do any work with it. Trying to use the HP cleaning tool gave me gibberish again. Just to test, I plugged the printer into my eMac and it works just fine. It’ll stay with the Mac.
I’ll keep using the KX-P1123 for what little I have to print off my Linux box, and save the KX-P2123 for the future DOS box. I’ll probably never get Linux to print the way I like. *sigh*
(Hint: For all those who just can’t resist trying to show off your brilliance by informing my poor benighted brain, put a sock in it. I’m applying the PLONK to all smart-alecks.)
