CentOS - Dec 2009 - College student printer for CentOS 5.4 x86_64?

Oldest son came back from college and wants a printer for his Dell
laptop.  I built it with CentOS 5.3 x86_64 several months ago and will
upgrade it to 5.4

The Cannon printer he now has (bought with the laptop and Vista through
the university book store), doesn't seem to have linux drivers. I built
the machine with Vista and CentOS in dual-boot, so he could manage his
iTunes and use the printer under Vista.  He does almost all his college
work under CentOS.  Most of his papers are submitted electronically, but
occasionally he has to print one.

What would the community recommend? His needs are simple...mostly B&W
papers.  On rare occasions he needs to print a paper with color
photos/graphs embedded. Not looking to spend a lot, just enough to
satisfy the requirement.

DaveM

> What would the community recommend? His needs are simple...mostly B&W
> papers.  On rare occasions he needs to print a paper with color
> photos/graphs embedded. Not looking to spend a lot, just enough to
> satisfy the requirement.
Install cups-pdf and have pdfs created by any application that can print. 
Save those somewhere that can be used by both (fat partition, usb stick, 
send email to himself, etc) and then print in Vista.  cups-pdf is 
available from epel repo.

> What would the community recommend? His needs are simple...mostly B&W
> papers.  On rare occasions he needs to print a paper with color
> photos/graphs embedded. Not looking to spend a lot, just enough to
> satisfy the requirement.
I wouldn't buy a color printer at all.
I assume, every decent college has some sort of print-shop on the campus
where you can make high-quality color printouts for pennies.
For black&white, I'd buy a decent laser printer.
Personally, I don't own a printer anymore since finishing university - I
print everything (usually a couple of pages per month) at work.
If I'd have to buy one now, I'd look for an appropriate Brother model.
They seem to have decent support for Linux.


cheers,
Rainer

On Fri, 2009-12-18 at 20:20 -0500, David McGuffey wrote:
> Oldest son came back from college and wants a printer for his Dell
> laptop.  I built it with CentOS 5.3 x86_64 several months ago and will
> upgrade it to 5.4
> 
> The Cannon printer he now has (bought with the laptop and Vista through
> the university book store), doesn't seem to have linux drivers. 
what model printer is this? Did you check http://www.linuxprinting.org?
You may also want to take a look at turboprint www.turboprint.info , it
is commercial, but offer good quality drivers for a lot of printers. It
will still be cheaper than to buy a new printer....

Louis

David McGuffey wrote:
> Oldest son came back from college and wants a printer for his Dell
> laptop.  I built it with CentOS 5.3 x86_64 several months ago and will
> upgrade it to 5.4
> 
> The Cannon printer he now has (bought with the laptop and Vista through
> the university book store), doesn't seem to have linux drivers. I built
> the machine with Vista and CentOS in dual-boot, so he could manage his
> iTunes and use the printer under Vista.  He does almost all his college
> work under CentOS.  Most of his papers are submitted electronically, but
> occasionally he has to print one.
> 
> What would the community recommend? His needs are simple...mostly B&W
> papers.  On rare occasions he needs to print a paper with color
> photos/graphs embedded. Not looking to spend a lot, just enough to
> satisfy the requirement.
> 
> DaveM
> 
Hi Dave,

I have 2 lasers one BW and the other colour.  The BW printer is a
Brother 5250DN  (N for network) and a samsung CLP-310 also network
capable.  The samsung comes with linux drivers on a CD.  Both are ery
affordable and work well with linux.

Phil