Matthew's Journal

So, I bought one of these off ebay for about £180 incl next-day delivery. I'm currently working on getting it going with linux.

It's on its own bit of ethernet, hanging off eth3 (currently setup as it came). I used lpadmin and foomatic-configure to get the system to know about it, and then the CUPS web interface to set some sensible defaults (use the large paper tray, use duplex). I frobbed samba (as per the cupsaddsmb man-page) to export the printer. This currently means making /var/spool/samba writable by anyone, as otherwise smbd complains it can't write to the directory to create a spool file[1].

TODO:
renumber the ethernet address of the printer
sort the permissions issue with smb (any ideas?)
review cupsd.conf to make sure access etc is sensible.

[1]

[2007/11/14 22:14:52, 1] smbd/service.c:make_connection_snum(642)
  jpl-111 (172.16.22.237) connect to service lj2300dtn initially as user sac48 (
uid=1053, gid=1053) (pid 27773)
[2007/11/14 22:15:30, 0] printing/printing.c:print_job_start(2297)
  print_job_start: insufficient permissions to open spool file /var/spool/samba/
smbprn.00000008.C6UOEZ.
[2007/11/14 22:15:30, 0] printing/printing.c:print_job_start(2297)
  print_job_start: insufficient permissions to open spool file /var/spool/samba/
smbprn.00000009.9R2Oen.
[2007/11/14 22:15:30, 1] smbd/service.c:close_cnum(835)
  jpl-111 (172.16.22.237) closed connection to service lj2300dtn

We need a new printer. Can anyone make any suggestions as to what is good / what should be avoided?

In an ideal world, it would fit the following criteria:

• Happy to only be used occasionally (I think this means laser not inkjet)
  
• Works well with linux (which I suspect means "can be driven without needing to configure cups")
  
• network or parallel or USB (I suspect the latter might cause issues, given I'm running a 2.4 series kernel, and don't do much USB) - I have a spare ethernet port I could hang it off to provide access control (assuming lpd can handle networked printers...)
  
• not painfully slow
  
• duplex
  
• likely to be reliable
  
• not vastly expensive to get new toner/ink for
  
• Not hugely expensive
  

I don't much care about colour.