Seems like every couple months I was buying ink cartridges for my HP Deskjet, so I decided to buy a cheap black & white laser printer. After spending a few hours reading posts on this forum and Googling I was more confused than before I started. Lots of people with printer problems, but hardly any solutions. Anyway, I bit the bullet and ordered a Samsung ML-2510 which arrived today. Cost was $79 after the $60 rebate.

I inserted the toner and some paper and hooked it up to my homemade box running Suse 10.2. Turned the computer on, Suse recognized the printer, and Yast installed it without a gripe. I should add that the ML-2510 wasn't listed in the Yast choice of printers, but I remembered that the ML-2010 was reported to work, and it did.

The printer came with drivers that include Linux, but I never used them. Manual is on CD, but I haven't looked at it. Web pages and Office documents are printing just fine. Installation was much simpler and quicker than installing a printer under Windows. I saw lots of posts where users complained of the printer's loudness. That's true, but I'm half deaf anyway.

Sorry for the double post.

Good to see. Given some of the difficulties trying to get Linux to print in the bad old days, it is really good to see the printing system improving. In fact, I think CUPS is now superior to Windows printing...

--Ian

It is best to add and configure printers through CUPS web panel instead through horrible GUI managers that the Linux distributor provides.

An $80 black and white laser printer will break down very, very soon. Samsung is not very good at making printers and also hard drives.

I have an Brother HL-5140. It is decent and fast when printing a lot of pages at once. The quality is better when I use linuxprinter.org ppd file instead from Brother. I used "Well Tempered Screening" for the halftone algorithm because it provides better graphics and makes the print out look like matte.

It is a lot better than Windows. CUPS uses user space to handle USB printers and many other printers using different connections. I think majority of the problems in the past with CUPS was inkjet printers were not reliable enough. Laser printers are more reliable than inkjet printers. Inkjet printers needs raw data and I think the filter that outputs raw data over loaded CUPS or just failed. At the time I first used CUPS (five years ago), I was not knowledge enough to edit its config files to be more verbose logging problems.

I did come across a problem when Windows users running the latest version of Adobe Reader sending to a network printer that uses CUPS. CUPS printer filters came to an error because I think it does not know a proprietary postscript command and just failed. An work around fix is clicking on Advance in print dialog box of Adobe Reader and select print as image. Then the PDF document should then print, but it will take a while for the client computer to process the PDF document to an image to send to the printer.