I just bought a new printer today on account of my old one has some sort of electronics fault (it will only print one or two pages after a complete cold reset and reinstall of the printer on the host computer). I picked up an HP Color LaserJet CP1518ni which I picked because it said on the box that it supports PCL and PostScript which pretty much guaranteed that it would work on my Linux box. It also connects via the network or by USB. And, it happened to be on for about 25% off.
So I got the thing home, scanned the "read this first" documents, removed all the extraneous shipping material, and connected it up to my computer. At this point, I expected a manual step or ten would be required to get the printer working.
Now, I should state at this point that I am running Ubuntu 8.04 on this particular computer. Thus, the installation instructions for Windows or Mac are useless. I only needed the printed instructions to know how to physically set the printer up. I fully expected some trials and tribulations to get things working.
Okay, so I powered up my monitor and the printer. While the printer was doing some interminable initialization task, I noticed a thing pop up on my computer screen saying it had detected the printer and installed a driver for it. The driver was for a different model but I thought, hey, it may well be correct. Once the printer finished it’s initializing and calibrating, I brought up the printer management system and printed a test page. And, wonder of wonders, it printed.
There was only one minor thing I needed to fix. The printer configuration defaulted to A4 paper which nobody uses in North America. I hear tell that most of the rest of the world does but that makes no difference to me since the readily available paper here is Letter size. Well, I tooled through the settings in the printer configuration tool and found the setting. I changed it, applied it, and printed another test page. And it worked.
So, the entire process of installing the printer was basically painless and involved no command line magic or Mad Skillz of any kind. The only problem was that, even though my time zone is North American, the paper size defaulted to the wrong thing. Still, even with A4 paper selected, the printer would be usable for the most part.
Granted, a different printer might not have worked so well. Still, that fact that any printer did is indicative of great progress in usability for Linux. I expect I would have had to jump through a few hoops with the CD that came with the printer for Windows or Mac, yet my Linux installation had a driver already and did almost all of the setup for me. Just a year or so ago, this would not have happened.
So, kudos to the Ubuntu team and all the other developers who contribute to the software that makes up Ubuntu. Keep up the good work and pretty soon we’ll have all the features of Windows and then some.And it will be implemented better.