Rony Bill wrote:
Hello Linuxers,
Please bear with the long mail. I am a new member here and my reason for joining is to get an idea of whats happenning in the Linux community especially in Mumbai. I am a hardware engineer by profession and I undertake maintainence for the SOHO segment. I learnt windows on my own since last 5 years by burning the midnight oil, but my networking knowledge is limitted to connecting machines peer to peer in windows. My first encounter with Linux was when Red Hat 8 was the current one. It loaded well on my Celeron 400 and I could configure the internet accounts and surf online using an external modem. However, the printouts in my LX 300 were never upto the same quality as in my Windows Me. The OpenOffice suite took longer to open in Linux than in Win. But the major problem was that printer could not get setup in OO so I would create docs in OO and open them in some other utility and print them. Ultimately that OS became a learning experiment than a proper day to day usable system.
<snip some part>
did not know what to do. Even in this OS, the print quality in my LX
300 is
very poor compared to my XP. Again, Open Office simply vomits my paper out whenever print command is given.
I am a self employed person like you. My involvement with GNU/Linux was more of enthusiasm rather then academic or carreer related. If you had used Red Hat Linux 8.0 you wouldn't had the above problem with printing, because with Red Hat 8.0 there was still support with LPRng. I also have a Epson LX 300 printer and I know that most of the business offices use DOT Matrix printers, especially small offices. Sadly, one would find people more talking about laser and ink jet printers in the lugs then dot matrix printers. In fact, earlier before most of the distros shifted to cups printing system, setting up printing with Dot Matrix was not so much of a pain. But laterly most of the distros have shifted to cups as their basic printing system and discarded LPRng (except Slackware and Suse - Oh I just love them both. But yes, Suse 9.1 does seem to have avoided LPRng. I have yet to check it out on that.) Before cups was available with Red Hat (or any distro), lpd was the basic printing tool available. But lpd had limitations since it printed only text files. To print other formats (typically the WYSIWYG type), one needed filters to output files in postscript format and then print it using ghostscript (a postscript interpreter). LPRng is the best printing tool for Dot Matrix printers. It appears that you have experimented with the latest distros, you will not be satisfied with the printing capabilities for you LX 300. My suggestion is to use Slackware 10.0. You will be more then satisfied. And trust me on that. I am using it at my office computer and I regularly take Spread sheet print outs from OpenOffice (1.1.2) or rather I should say ConectivaOffice ( the best compiled Open Office I have used so far).
Slackware uses apsfilter a filter setup program which uses the gnu-gs-fonts and ghostscript to make postscript output files and prints using LPRng. It is very simple but requires a bit of printing understanding to set it up. Believe me the print outs are better then the ones you get with Windows XP (or whatever).
HTH, Rajen.