Re: home printer

On 2020-09-17 12:15, Greg Thomas wrote:
> I've always been happy with the cheap Brother laser printers with ethernet,
> even with just their version of Postscript. But I believe they still sell
> Postscript printers, too.
>
> On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 10:07 AM Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de> wrote:
>
>> Hi Carson,
>>
>> Carson Chittom wrote on Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 09:51:45AM -0500:
>>> Jan Stary <hans@stare.cz> writes:
>>>> Can people please recommend a home laser printer
>>>> that is known to work well with OpenBSD?
>>>>
>>>> I would like to avoid cups, and possibly a2ps
>>>> and foo* and if= and all that dance
>>>> - a printer that speaks postscript and is as easy as
>>>> lp:lp=/dev/lp:sd=/var/spool/output/lpd:lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:
>>> HP at least used to (and I assume still do) make several decent
>>> printers that spoke Postscript.
>> That answer used to be spot on until about the year 2000. After
>> that, quality of HP laser printers went down the drain very rapidly.
>> One office i worked in decided in 2003 that the then more then five
>> year old HP LaserJet might die from old age soon and bought a new
>> one to be safe and not experience service disruption. The old one
>> was left running, too, because why not, and printing traffic was
>> shared about evenly between the two because people tended to use
>> the one closest to their desk.
>>
>> When the *successor* of the new one died from old age about six to
>> eight years later (i.e. when two of the new ones had worn out one
>> after the other, don't remember how long they lasted exactly, but
>> not longer than three or four years i think), the old one was still
>> going strong. If i remember correctly, when the pre-2000 one finally
>> did die from old age, it was probably fifteen years old, if not
>> more, with continuous office use.
>>
>> I doubt HP printers have become better again, but i'm not sure.
>>
>>> In particular, I've used the
>>> CP1525nw in the past with OpenBSD. Haven't tried it in a couple
>>> years, though; none of my OpenBSD machines need to print, these
>>> days.
>> Same here. Currently, a Kyocera P2135dn is sitting on the desk here,
>> but i can't say whether it is good because i'm printing so little.
>>
>> To the OP, what matters is a decent PostScript Processor
>> and a RJ45 Ethernet connector, then it will work with OpenBSD
>> no matter what.
>>
>> Yours,
>> Ingo
>>
>>

Greg has the right idea. I've had a great experience with my Brother
MFC-L5700 laser printer. I can print Postscript and PDF documents to it
directly using lpd/lpr in the OpenBSD base system, and the printer
supports directly uploading scans to an FTP/SFTP server. It's quite nice
being able to print and scan without messing around with drivers/cups
and the dark arts magic required to make it work reliably.

I set my printer up by enabling lpd and adding a single line in my
/etc/printcap file:

lp|remote line printer:\
:lp=:rm=192.0.2.5:rp=lp:sd=/var/spool/output/lpd:lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:



So far this setup has been totally bulletproof and has yet to fail me
after over 5000 scanned pages and a couple thousand print jobs.

Regards,

Jordan