Breaking the Grip of Wintel (Home Printing Series)

[ Part 1/2 - Introduction and background ]

I don't know if many of you remember when Win-Modems came on the seen back in the day but they were really a pain in the ass!    My first modem was a Hayes 300 Baud modem that hooked up to the Super Serial card in my Apple IIe.  This was wonderful because you could use your modem with any computer that had a serial port.

When Win-Modems came along, you could only use them if you were running Windows.  Sure they were cheap because they had a reduce chipset and off loaded some of the modem functionality to the processor and the OS.  They also went tits up for may people but were cheap to replace.   I think the philosophy was ... If its broke, don't fix it...just say oh brother and go buy another!.

Well, it was this experience that will drive my purchasing decisions in the future!  I am used to having a plethora of machines in my home office but it was not until I experimented with my kids when they were in school, that I began to take note.  When my kids were little they each had their own Mac and PC and as they got older, I moved to a Family configuration separate from my personal and lab computers.  I also moved to a NAS cluster group and a separate network segment just for them. 

When I saw that the schools began to rely heavily on MS Word, Powerpoint and such, I moved the kids to a laptop model and thus I  initiated my big experiment.  My kids thought that MS Word and Powerpoint came on every computer so when I had to rebuild one because they had crapped it up, I replaced it with a Linux machine.

This turned out to be very interesting and I am glad that my kids were able to adapt through different surprise OS installations but that is not the subject at hand.  I just wanted to lay some ground work for what wanted to talk about.

Through the years one thing has remained constant....The need to print!.  I have had many many different printers and all-in-one machines over the years.  I maintain at least three different OSes at any given time.   Windows, OSX and some form of Linux. 

As I move to running Linux as a daily driver (either Ubuntu or Mint primariliy), I have come to realize that all printers are not created equal!  Linux/Unix printing can be challenging and sometimes the lure of a cheap printer is just not worth the hassle if you cannot get it to function in a homogeneous environment.  I   should be able to print, scan, fax from any machine in my network without hassles.

Getting my printing under control was a primary objective as my kids ALWAYS wanted to print out color and often they would come running to the basement to ask if something printed, quickly grew old when trouble shooting their printing issues.

I needed universal network printing that would work with OSX, Linux, Window, Solaris, AIX, True64, BSD and HP/UX.  Now I know that this may be a bit more than most of you have in your home network but I usually have to touch some of these OSes at some point during the week. The first three (OSX, Linux, Windows) are probably more applicable to you.

Also with all of the home media offerings, you may also want to include connectivity to your game console, media server, home sharing server and even your mobile devices like your phone and tablets.

With all of this convergence in technology, and trying to put together a home network that was versatile, I quickly found that there were two big pains with printers.   Let's face it, Printers and Sound are two of the most difficult devices to configure.  Most people are shielded by the complexities of printers by the Wintel machine and the automatic driver configurations but in reality, printers and sound cards are not that easy.  There was a point in time where printer driver support was not very good across platforms.  Even today, you can find that there is no support for older printers on Windows 8 and 7 and trying to get an older printer from years ago may only have drivers for Window 98.  It also becomes more difficult if you want to use Linux and CUPS printer.

Printers used to be expensive but are very cheap because the cost model is now centered around the consumables such as Ink and toner cartridges.

The following items now drive my printer purchasing decisions.

• Does it have an ethernet port?
• Is it wireless?
• What is the average cost to replace the ink / toner cartridges?
• If I run out of color ink, will the printer still function with just black?
• Does it support Linux / CUPS printinting?

In [PART-2] I will explore each of these important point in detail and why they are important to me.

Eunix