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We desperately needed a scanner. Also the old printer got almost unusable, leaving black strips on the paper after an ink cartridge leaked and smeared the ink on all the plastic foam inside it. The decision seems obvious: multifunction device.

Of mainstream printer manufacturers, only Epson and HP are friendly to the Open Source and thus are supported under Linux. We had a price tag and wanted to get the box from a local shop, as the need was really urgent. This made the choice very easy: HP Photosmart C6180. It is a printer, scanner, copier and fax.

Under Windows, scanner “just works”. Printer works, but the driver is poor. I could not do lots of things with it such as:

• print borderless A4 image (datasheet says the printer can do it)
• print an image in a particular size in a particular place of the page

Driver presents strange options, such as setting all four margins for an image. How can you have all the four of them, I do not know.

Now the interesting part: support under Linux.

HP printers are supported with hplip. My Ubuntu Edge had a version, which did not contain support for this printer model. I downloaded sources and built the newest hplip; compilation went OK, except that it required net-snmp, which also was not in the distribution and had to be installed manually. Fortunately the chain ended at this point.

USB connection worked “out of the box”. Cups web interface saw the printer in the “add printer” dialog. After its addition, the new printer was present in all print dialogs.

WLAN connection worked practically out of the box, with instructions from Ubuntu forums.

But that did not make me completely happy. From what I see this late evening:

• GIMP must use generic Postscript driver. So, there is no any fine control over the printout. Guys, I’d not call this “perfect support” without selection of:
  • Paper type
  • Resolution
  • Print quality (draft/standard/high)
  • Option to print borderless
• Other applications, which use the hplip driver present the same interface as Windows. So they are missing the features of gimp-print drivers - especially scaling and positioning of the image. Borderless printing does not work neither: about 5mm borders are still left, and the image is simply cut HPLIP site gives instructions, but they do not work at all.

The scanner is not recognized. Xsane does not see any device, although it has hplip configured.

Continued: After upgrade to Ubuntu 7.04, scanner is recognized! Thank you Ubuntu team.

“In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil.”

This is from a response to “Gedo Senki,” the Earthsea film made by Goro Miyazaki for Studio Ghibli; but this citation deserves much wider audience than fans of Ursula’s books.