In this episode of Linux in the Ham Shack, our heroes manage to stay more or less on topic, which means there might be some actual content for the listeners. Hooray for small miracles. In segment one, Richard discusses his adventure at the Texoma Hamarama in Ardmore, Oklahoma. In segment two, the boys get all Ham Geeky™ about hamqth.com and all the neat things one can do with it. In the third and final segment, the Linux Geeky™ topic is CUPS and how to making printing easier for those who wish to do it using Linux.
73 de The LHS Guys
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4 comments on “LHS Episode #069: Our CUPS Runneth Over”
Wow, what did Cups do to you? How could you say such an awful thing. Cups wasn’t originally written by Apple! They hired it’s developer (Michael Sweet, owner of ‘Easy Software Products’) and bought the source code 8 years into the project!
Have you considered skipping the ‘all in one’ printer? I like to keep my scanner separate. I know you are on a budget, I’m using a hand me down myself. If I didn’t have that though I see scanners in thrift shops all the time for a couple bucks or so. Or.. you could probably get 1 or 20 of them off your local FreeCycle list.
The advantage is… printers just seem to need changed out a lot. Mostly because it gets hard to get the cartridges just like you are experiencing. If your scanner is separate it usually lasts a really long time…. then… you don’t have to worry about the driver headache. Just save a copy of your SANE config. With an all in one you need to find one where there is Linux support for BOTH the scanner and the printer part. Why make it harder on yourself?
Another suggestion for saving money and headache… Cannon. Yeah it’s likely to be more expensive off the bat than Lexmark but… they don’t seem to obsolete the cartridges so quickly. Better yet… they have a lot of models with separate cartridges for each color. If you run out of one you can replace just that one. And he head is separate. Usually this is much cheaper than replacing all the colors and the printhead just because you ran out of blue (for example).
Don’t forget used printers too. People dump them a lot just because Windows 7/Vista/whatever dropped the driver support.
I second Rus’s recommendation of laser IF you find an affordable one. The big expensive ones you see in offices tend to be really easy to find Linux drivers for. You might find a business getting rid of one. The consumables are expensive but one set will last just about most peoples lifetimes in the home. I used one that I found free back in college. It got me through about 3 semesters printing out homework and such blinking error messages that things were running out the whole time. It was still going when I traded it away for something else I wanted.
Ouch! I wasn’t looking for an apology! Whoever wrote it originally wasn’t me! I was just picking on Apple. Yeah, I read Wikipedia before I posted that. Wikipedia wasn’t really my source. I was checking my memory because I remember Apple buying it but wanted to make sure I remembered correctly.
I wasn’t pissed off! I was poking some fun too! I’m sorry it came off that way!
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