larry price said the following on 05/29/2005 11:18 PM:
On my semi regular trip to Costco I spotted this Canon Multifunction
copy/scan/print
machine for USD 169.99 after checking that I could bring it back if it
was not compatible I figured "hey, what have I got to lose", since it
has most of the feature set I was looking for (b/w laser printer,
scanner,copier, etc.)
After setting it up and using it as a copier (to make sure it actually works)
I went ahead and tried to set it up as a printer using
Ubuntu's/Gnome's gnome-cups-config utility.
The first try did not work, nor did the second, after a certain amount
of googling it seems that this device is too new to be supported.
I figure I'm going to take a stab at making it work, if anyone has any
idea on how to go about gathering the necessary information to write a
.ppd file for a new device, and what info would be needed to make that
happen, please share it with me.
I've already dumped the lsusb info for the device, but don't know
enough about this particular dark corner of computing to make this
work quickly.
[email protected]
And finally a few questions:
why is printing so unnecessarily complicated?
Because the printer manufacturers think they protect their
business by keeping the printer protocol secret. This is the
same stupidity that sunk the general Unix market. But evidently
Unix history is not being taught in MBA programs.
Why hasn't adobe made a stab at licensing usb chipsets that
understand pdf?
It's just software. Every printer has its own custom chips.
We make chips that go into most of the HP printers.
At one point I figured that about half of the printers in
the world had a circuit I had designed. I'm sure that is no
longer true.
Printers are ruthlessly cost sensitive. Adding a special chip
that just does PDF formatting just isn't going to happen.
Fact is, most manufacturers are going in the opposite direction.
Take all the smarts out of the printer and load it onto the
PC. Save a few bucks in the printer.
How many people would pay $20-$50 more for a printer because
it advertised that it didn't load down your computer as much?
Very-very few. So it just isn't going to happen except in
the high end business models that are network enabled.
--
Allen Brown
work: Agilent Technologies non-work: http://www.peak.org/~abrown/
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a
managerial challenge roughly comparable to herding cats.
--- The Washington Post Magazine, June 9, 1985
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