Printer advice

Manish Jain bourne.identity at hotmail.com
Sat May 13 23:49:11 UTC 2017


On Sun, May 14, 2017 at 3:48 AM, Chris Hill <chris at monochrome.org> wrote:
I wonder if anyone can offer advice on a new printer. My old HP 4550N has finally given up the ghost after more than 16 years of semi-faithful service. I'm looking for a color laser printer with ethernet interface and Postscript comprehension. I'm currently looking at the HP M553n and the Xerox Phaser 6515DN, but if you have other suggestions, ideas, caveats... I'd love to hear them. Thanks.


Any recent HP printer should work well under FreeBSD. The printer can be made to work with CUPS,  and/or local printing and scanning with hplip / sane-backends. To install everything in one go : pkg install cups hplip sane-backends

To use it as a CUPS printer, put cupsd_enable="YES" in /etc/rc.conf, reboot and use the administrative website at http://localhost:631/admin where you can add a queue.

Some printers which do not work with CUPS can be made to work by deleting the CUPS queue and directly running the printer under hplip. To setup hplip, use 'hp-setup'.

Tips :

1) If hp-setup refuses to start complaining of "missing sip", delete the hplip
package and build the devel/hplip port with qt4, not qt5

2) 'scanimage -L' should list your scanner nicely, at least as root.

Hope this helps
Manish Jain



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