I have a dual boot system with a Kodak printer. I only boot windows to use the printer. And the printer is crap anyway. Gone through three print heads and it eats ink cartridges. What I am looking for:

1. Works with fedora 8 without standing on my head and spitting nickles.

2. Reliable.

3. Minimum bells and whistles. I don't need to print photos, scan, make copies and I don't even need color printing.

4. Cheap.

5. Small would be nice.

6. usb, serial, parallel or ethernet connections available.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

Skippy

I think HP printers work very well, the other brands tend to have the cartridges clog with ink very easily and to rip papers when feeding them. HP at least has got this down and have good Linux support for their printers. Check the site above that FredGSanford posted for a list.

not brother 7010 since you need parallell cabel for the printer and usb for the scaner.


my experiance with linux and printers is to use the parallell port. So a printer with parallell is better.

my experiance is that laser works better.

And check for drivers before buying.

good luck.

HP Laser Printer--HP appears to have the best linux support of all printer makers.

I have never used the parallel port for any printer with Linux. I have never had an issue with USB--except for one quirk: HP Laser won't work without USB-II. (Hardly an issue with current computers.)
My HP laser doesn't even HAVE a parallel port.

+1 from me for HP printers. They work very well for me using Linux and FreeBSD. Epson printers also generally work well with Linux.

Nowadays, it shouldn't really matter. USB is well supported on all its versions under linux. For the rest, it's the controlled chip of the printer which has to be supported, and that has nothing to do with usb vs. parallel.

I would check openprinting.org as someone suggested above.

My advice is to go with a laser printer if you are going to be printing lots of documents. With the time you will be happy if you do so. Ink printers waste too much ink, so the final price will be more expensive than you thought when you bought it

Another good thing about laser printers is that they tend to break much less, and dry ink doesn't obstruct the heads. Nowadays, I would no longer advice buying an ink printer. Too much problems and stuff.

Lasers are cheap enough nowadays, and there are small models that might be of interest to you, for example:

http://www.insidehw.com/Reviews/Peri...r-Printer.html
http://uk.shopping.com/xPO-Samsung-2...-150MHz-GDI8MB

Which seems to be perfectly supported. It will work for you if you don't need color printing, and toners are not the most expensive ones either.

http://openprinting.org/show_printer...amsung-ML-1640

Hello,

I would suggest a Brother HL-2030 or HL-2140, the are both small and cheap and give very nice text prints.

Best regards,

Yves

I have a Samsung ML-2510 mono Laser Printer - it is very fast and works well with both Ubuntu 8.04 and Win 98 (dual boot) (it also worked with FC5 and FC6). This model is a few years old, but I expect there is a more recent Samsung model.

I say go with an HP as well. Don't know if Fedora 8 will configure it automagically, but they're easy to install with cups, and there's loads of cups drivers provided for them.

Samsung printers work great in Linux as well.

Samsung ML-2571
25 pages per minute Laser
USB
Parallel
10/100 Network interfaces
approx $150.00

Hard to beat that price for a printer with a built in network print server

http://www.provantage.com/samsung-ml-2571n~7SAMQ066.htm

I just use the .ppd file to install the printer in Linux rather than screwing around with the Samsung Unified Linux driver.



I agree with the HP and Brother sentiments as well. all good choices.

You didn't say what linux you were using but HP seems to support linux better then most. Its been about 6 yrs since I had a pc with a parallel port, I have always used usb printers with Linux. Mandriva 2009 does a great job setting up a HP printer. It also did a good job of setting up a Canon IP6600d and Canon has done a lousy job of supporting Linux.