‘Nother project last night…

I have been without a printer at home for a couple of months. Normally when equipment like this stops working I replace it immediately. I’m not sure why I waited so long before buying a new one. Busy doing other things, I guess.

Anyway, the last three printers that I have owned were HP all-in-one printers. You know the type. These are the printer, copier, scanner, and fax machines all in one box. I have always told myself that I needed all of that capability. Honestly, I rarely ever use anything but the printer. Of course, I’ll bust my ass getting all of the functions of the all-in-one to work under Linux but then I never use them once they’re set up.

So since I have been getting about two years of life out of my printers, I opted for the cheap route. This time around all I wanted was just a printer. I didn’t want a fancy photo printer and I didn’t want any features that would go unused. Plus I wanted cheap ink cartridges for once. Tired of dropping $30 for ink. Plus I’m tired of my wife crying the blues about the cost of ink when it’s her that’s using it up…and she’s the smart one.

I picked up an HP Deskjet D2430 Series printer from Tiger Direct. It was delivered last night. They don’t come any simpler than this. It almost looks like a toy. I think McDonald’s puts these in their happy meals. I could be wrong. It’s really small. Maybe this time I won’t feel so bent over when it stops working on me. There’s no digital display. Just three buttons. This thing looks like it would be easy to clean too.

Setting this printer up in Linux (openSUSE 10.3) was a cake walk as always. Do you like cake? I love the stuff. The driver was already supplied by the OS so I didn’t have to go hunting for anything. I think it took me three minutes from start to the time that it finished kicking out that green lizard test page.

What I struggled with last night was setting up a print server properly. I have never had trouble with this in the past and I was unable to figure it out last night. I couldn’t get any of my ubuntu PC’s nor Windows XP to send a test page to the printer. Sure, I could see the printer and map to it from these other computers but I just couldn’t send a test page. I had my firewall in openSUSE turned off, samba shares looked fine, cups info looked fine, permissions looked fine. Just cannot get it to share properly.

I have a NAS enclosure with a print server in it that I wasn’t using. I believe it’s running samba. So I unplugged my usb printer cord from the back of my PC and plugged it into the NAS device. This time Windows XP found it and could print but with a long delay, about a minute between the time that I hit the print button until the printer finally initialized. I figured if Windows worked than Linux should work as well. However, openSUSE was unable to map to this network printer setup. Didn’t try ubuntu. Too bad because for a second there it looked like the way to go. I’m sure I mistyped a setting or two. Nevertheless, I gave up on it quickly.

So I unplugged from my NAS and plugged back into my PC and called it quits for the night. I am not sure what I am forgetting. I have a crappy memory for stuff like this. I have always used the KDE printer manager to set this up in the past and this time I do not have it installed. Maybe I should go that route if I still can. In the meantime, at least I can print…so the heck with everyone else in my household. On the other hand, if they were crafty, they could just VNC into my machine and print what they wanted. Yeah…you’re right…they’ll never do that.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 at 1:28 pm and is filed under Authors Sites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.