Would you recommend the product? yes | Price you paid?: $100.00 | Rating: 9
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Kernel (uname -r):
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2.6.17-5mdv
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Distribution:
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Mandriva 2007.1
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Unpacked printer, plugged it into power, plugged USB into computer.
Mandriva 2007.1 immediately detected it and asked if I would like to have it configured. I said "yes". Took about 5 minutes; Mandriva downloaded and installed the packages it needed without incident, and the printer immediately worked with both text and graphics.
I then went to my Windows 2000 virtual machine running in VMWare 4.5 and selected Add New Printer. I browsed for a network printer and the C3180 was not found. Closed the printer wizard, waited about a minute, and tried again. This time the C3180 was detected by Windows as available for sharing on the Mandriva 2007.1 host system, and I added it. Windows prompted for a disk with a driver in it because Mandriva didn't have the Windows driver available for download and sharing. I inserted the CDROM provided by HP, the driver was installed, and immediately worked for both text and graphics from Windows. I have in the past had trouble making this work from VMWare to Mandriva; having it go with no issues here was quite nice.
I then fired up the Mandriva control panel, and chose to configure scanner. The control panel recognized the existence of the scanner and asked me to choose a driver. There was no scanner driver for the C3180 available, and many of the other Photosmart scanners that were listed were listed as "unsupported". I chose a generic "Photosmart Scanner" driver and installed it. The scanner immediately worked without issue and I could use Kooka to scan and save documents.
Everything worked painlessly. I see the following issues: (1) Windows drivers weren't available for installation when the printer was configured; (2) I had to configure the scanner separately, and I had to choose the driver because no exactly appropriate driver was available for the scanner; and (3) it is not obvious to me that I'll be able to use any OCR software with the scanner, though I need to investigate that a bit before saying for sure.
However, these are minor issues. The printer integrated right into the system and is now working without apparent flaw.
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