I'm looking for a label printer that will work with Linux, and has some sort of "easy" way to print text-only labels. I'm partial to either Brother or Dymo printers that take the "normal" tape cartridges used by the handheld ones, as we have quite a few of them lying around.

Here's the scenario:
We're re-patching two racks of servers, and want to label both ends of the cables. Each label will be a flag type, with four lines of text. This is going to add up to about 200+ labels, and we have all of the data in a MySQL database.

I know I've found CUPS drivers for the Brother printers, but the notes on them seem to imply that they can only print graphics or from OpenOffice templates, not just plain old text. I need something that can easily be scripted (Perl, PHP, Python, whatever) in terms of the text and orientation of the label.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Jason

Suggestion:
Have a look at imagemagick(?sp) which does a lot of image conversions. Doing bitmaps but not text implies no postscript stage in the print process.

There are also many pre-written scripts for gimp to mangle things.