Lexmark's Linux Secret

[7ronic]

I generally agree with drag's post.

[kernelOfTruth]

interesting, thank you for that info, on the next all in one choice I know a little more

yeah, go Brother !

Brother MFC's and printers are full of win due to their great driver support

if you want to use their full potential I'd go with the cupswrapper & lpr drivers,

the BR-Script3 drivers seem to work fine, too but they are much slower (at least for me)


I've already used 4-5 Brother printers / MFCs and each of them worked flawlessly

[Apteryx]

Samsung also offers great linux support. They even have a linux gui installation app on their driver cd. Though I think they are proprietary, but I don't know for sure.

Well they work as a charm at least.

They do offer linux support. I wouldn't go as far as qualifying it as "great", though. With my SCX-4200 printer, it's always a bit of a fight to setup the scanner (the printer is now supported by an open-source driver), and the Printer Configurator requires a ton of deprecated libraries in weird places to work.

Worst, it seems they dropped support since about a year. I had inquired about it, but without proper answer. See in their driver downloads : http://www.samsung.com/us/support/de..._name=SCX-4200.

Do you see linux support? Not me. Their drivers are also closed-source (at least they used to be for my printer). And judging by the quality of their install script (it used to wreck permissions and cause security issues), I am not sure it's a good thing.

[msebast]

WTF?

This whole article is just bullshit from start to end.

Michael,

I agree with everything Drag said.

I'm not sure if HP puts a penguin on the box, but based on this article I'd still recommend buying HP.

You seemed very enthusiastic. What could justify your enthusiasm? Is there some important point you forgot to mention? Are these drivers actually opensource? Is Lexmark working with the CUPS and SANE projects so this stuff will start working out of the box?

[danboid]

How sad!

Sad that lexmark are plastering Tux on their packaging, pretending to be FOSS friendly only for you to find out you can only get a closed-source driver and your scanner won't work as you'd expect via sane- liars!

The irony here is that HP don't advertise Linux support on their printers and not only that but support will also say they don't support their printers under Linux.. but they all work, every time. All HP printers and scanners, old and new just work straight out of the box with HPLIP. I can safely say that HP printer and scanner support is better under Linux than under Windows in many respects and yet they say Linux is 'unsupported'!

Drivers aren't such a big deal when you are lucky enough to have networked printers you can FTP your PDF files like you can on most laserjets. This enables printing on OSs that currently lack a working printing system but do have networking ie Haiku. I'll still be recommending HP for printers it seems.

[Melcar]

April Fool's joke? I must admit that I haven't been that current with the whole printer situation since I bought my last all-in-one two three years ago. Was a rabid Lexmark fan before that, usually because they are cheap as dirt over here, reliable, and easily available. Hurt me a bit when I had to spend $50 extra on a HP of a lesser feature set just to get good Linux compatibility (not to mention spending nearly twice the money on ink cartridges). Not that HP is bad or anything; they're rather nice for the price, but Lexmark always had a stronger line-up all things considered.
HP and Brother are my go to brands these days. Thankfully Brother has some cheap laser printers that are of good quality. Still sucks being limited to a few brands though.

[jhansonxi]

I generally hate Lexmark consumer inkjets because of their horrible paper handling. I like that they are making a point to support Linux now as it may help me when converting users that have Lexmark printers. In the past I often had to tell them to buy a new one which isn't appealing from their PoV when comparing Windows TCO to Linux. I'll have to look at their current product line to see if they have improved. I hope they release drivers for some of the older unsupported models.

The last HP AiO I bought, a C5180, had a premature failure due to a bad design of a flex circuit connecting the front panel controls to the base. It was sharply bending in the hinge area which caused it to crack, disabling the controls. I wasted a ridiculous amount of time diagnosing the problem and trying to find a replacement cable. It ended up being recycled as none was available and I couldn't find any way to fabricate a substitute. CUPS and SANE support was excellent but the poor quality and lack of replacement parts really annoyed me.

[DeepDayze]

I use a Brother MFC and i can scan over network. This is possible for Windows, Mac and Linux. It is all in the scannerdriver.

Ditto

I own a Brother MFC-465CN and I can scan over a network with Brother's scanner driver.

Hopefully Lexmark will enhance their drivers with scanner support by at least adding a separate driver package for the scanner.

[robhwill]

Pretty good article over all. Thanks. The underlying issue w/Lexmark is it was/is (IBM); if still IBM, there simply *no* reason to lag behind in linux/unix or any compatibility w/IBM background. The most basic issuer for me (have HP currently) past few years is this: When I buy a color printer I expect to be able to print *black* no matter the status of the colors, whether ink or toner. IOW, if out of cyan, magenta, etc. I should *still* be able to do black if I have black toner or ink. But alas, HP past few years has required *all* toner/inks to be full to continue. Design flaw IMHO. Lastly.....
What the *heck* to you mean 65 pages of taxes!!!???
Are you a one-man multi-national corp. or something??? Take Care.
Have A Healthy, Prosperous Day!
----rob

[squirrl]

Lexmark good idea

I'm excited that they are brave enough to put the Penguin on their box.
It's a sign that Microsoft is loosening their grip on the economy.

Kooka is the best scanner software I've used. It's KDE 3.5, so you have to have the old library support. You probably don't need it. The device is smart enough.

For instances I use my HTC/Android Phone for a lot of stuff. It's got wifi so I wonder if I can print to one of these.

I was at bestbuy and saw where most are shipping with bluetooth.