Newbie - print drivers

[Edwin]

Great news!

As to your Brother, you could ask at http://www.linuxprinting.org/newspor...rother.general if someone knows what driver to use. There is also a KDE-printing mailinglist. You can subscribe at http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-print/. Or just try one of the other MFC-models from the list. Could just work.

Happy printing.

- - Edwin

[A. Jorge Garcia]

arrggghhhh!!!!

EDIT: OOPS, I thought you were referring to my Brother typewritter....

[j.drake]

As to your Brother, you could ask at http://www.linuxprinting.org/newspor...rother.general if someone knows what driver to use.

Wow! Thanks, Edwin. There's nothing good for this all-in-one, I'm afraid. The page you linked to reported some success with printing, using the hl7x0 driver, which I downloaded, but apparently there is no known way to exploit the multifunction capabilities of the device, and it does not appear to be an issue of concern to Brother, either. Worse yet, it appears that they are unwilling to share information which would allow someone else to create it.

This isn't surprising to me. Brother took its sweet time releasing WinXP drivers, and gave very patchy support to the idea of adapting Win2K drivers for XP - the fix involved several pages of documentation, a goodly amount of registry editing, and a whole lot of other user-unfriendly manipulation, just to get the d*mn thing to print. Once they finally released XP drivers, I had to undo all of the Win2K patches and reinstall, only to find out that the bundled software and utilities packages wouldn't work. This, despite the fact that Brother was still selling the device in mainstream office supply stores, but now had the temerity to slap big, loud, WinXP Compatible stickers on the outside. It did not impress me.

It's really a shame, because the unit itself has a lot of potential, and really seemed to pack a lot of value into a small package. IOW, the mechanical design and concept were good, but the software support sucked, IMO. Anyway, my point is that if they don't care enough to deliver full functionality to the OS that's bundled with 90-something percent of new PC's, I really shouldn't expect them to move two inches towards supporting Linux. Sad.

[Edwin]

This isn't surprising to me. Brother took its sweet time releasing WinXP drivers, and gave very patchy support to the idea of adapting Win2K drivers for XP

Brother wasn't the only one, if that is any comfort to you. What is bugging me is that they can get away with this attitude.

"We said it would work. You bought the device. If it doesn't work it's your problem.". "OK, to stop the flood of emails and phone-calls that disturb our lunch we have a fix. Our parrot just finished translating it from Japanese into English. Here it is. Now it is your problem again." "And oh do you want to recieve updates on future product-releases? Have a nice day"

Slightly related: a Dutch consumer-organisation did a test of several inkjet-printers recently. All inkjets display a warning if the cartridge is nearly empty. On most printers you can ignore that message and print a few more pages. Not on Epson printers. The techies discovered a chip that simply disables printing after that warning. They then bypassed that chip and discovered that you could get another 10 to 15 percent more pages from a cartridge.

An Espson spokesperson said it was not true. A day later they said it was to protect the printnozzels. Another day later they issued a statement that they were talking with the consumer-organisation and were "declining any further comment'

If your Dutch is up to par, let me know and I'll post the link. The testreport is not available in English.

Regards,

- - Edwin

[j.drake]

If your Dutch is up to par, let me know and I'll post the link. The testreport is not available in English.

I am hopelessly inadequate to the task of translating Dutch. I am from Texas (USA), but wife is of Dutch heritage, and remembers the elders speaking it in her home (her grandparents emigrated from Friesland). Much as we try to preserve the heritage for our daughter (e.g., we celebrate Sinterklaasdag, and bake speculaas and boterkoek), neither of us speak the language. In fact, offhand, all I can remember from the beginning language tape is "Waar kon ik een viets vinden?", which isn't of great assistance to me in diagnosing a printer problem. Maybe - Waar kon ik een druker instellen???

[alangeev]

I know this is an old post but I have a similar problem in knoppix 3.3 using a epson stylus c43ux printer. It works almost perfectly in 3.2 when configured as a cx41ux but there apears to be no foomatic driver in 3.3.Otherwise the printer wizard in 3.3 is very easy to use Its just that my range of printers isnt there