Eric S. Raymond was right about CUPS some fourteen years ago, in his essay "The Luxury of Ignorance" (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html), and things really haven't gotten any better. Here's an update since I last posted about six weeks ago. I had an HP LaserJet 1100a, which worked reasonably well until its internal memory went bad. These things happen. So I got a more recent HP Pro 1102w which is no end of trouble; I could print to it a bit, irregularly, but now not at all -- everything seems to be configured properly but CUPS reports "Waiting for printer to become available" and nothing I do, from writing udev rules to rebooting, makes it available. So I bought another printer, a Lexmark MS415dn, in part for its three-penguin rating [ = "works perfectly with Linux"] on openprinting.org, but it does not work perfectly, spitting out endless pages of gibberish when I sent it PDFs or PostScript files, to the point where it prints only once out of every two or three attempts. I won't go through all the details of what I've tried, but I have tried, and tried, and tried. More or less at my wit's end -- actually, I can see my wit's end receding in the distance in the rear-view mirror -- and proving that I cannot learn from experience, I'm considering buying something that should just work, that is, of getting a monochrome single-function laser printer with embedded PostScript to handle my needs, which, you'd think, would be a sufficiently humble set of requirements. You'd think. If anyone on this list can recommend such a beast, which can run reliably under Linux (specifically arch linux), I would be almost shamefully greatful. Nearly as good would be cautions about what to avoid. Thanks. -- Peter King peter.king@utoronto.ca Department of Philosophy 170 St. George Street #521 The University of Toronto (416)-946-3170 ofc Toronto, ON M5R 2M8 CANADA http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/ ========================================================================= GPG keyID 0x7587EC42 (2B14 A355 46BC 2A16 D0BC 36F5 1FE6 D32A 7587 EC42) gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 7587EC42