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pa4wdh
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 Posted: Wed Dec 13, 2017 10:34 am Post subject: Printer/scanner with full open source support |
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Hi All,
I see this topics pops up every once in a while, i hope you are able to help.
I'm looking for a printer/scanner (all-in-one) device which is supported completely with open source drivers, and that seems to be quite challenging. Does anyone here have a suggestion ? HP seems to do a nice job with their hplip package, but many printers require a "binary plugin", and with HP's recent news of keyloggers in drivers i don't trust their binaries anymore.
My requirements are:
- Printing / scanning (copying not required)
- I prefer laser over inkjet because i don't print that much and ink tends to dry out before i can use it 
- USB or othernet connection
- No binary stuff in drivers, supported by cups/sane
Thanks in advance.
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fturco
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Location: Italy
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| Posted: Wed Dec 13, 2017 12:01 pm Post subject: |
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| Recently I bought a multifunction device (laser printer + scanner) from HP after checking their website in order to be sure no binary plugins were needed. Unfortunately I discovered they made an error on their website and the device I received required proprietary software in order to print. I had to send the printer back to the seller. I recommend not to trust HP/HPLIP website. Instead, you may try buying from ThinkPenguin. They only sell hardware which can be used with a 100% free software system. |
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pa4wdh
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| Posted: Wed Dec 13, 2017 6:20 pm Post subject: |
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Thanks for your reply. Which printer did you buy ?
I copied the supported printer list from the HP website into libreoffice calc to be able to filter the huge list, and it seems that the combination of things i want don't exist. It's either color with a binary driver, or B&W without.
With that result, and the HP LaserJet M130 on ThinkPenguin's website i think that would be my best alternative.
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The gentoo way of bringing peace to the world:
USE="-war" emerge --newuse @world
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fturco
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pa4wdh
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| Posted: Fri Dec 15, 2017 9:43 am Post subject: |
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Thanks for the info, that's quite annoying.
It also makes me curious what ThinkPenguin does with the printer so it doesn't need the binary plugin 
_________________
The gentoo way of bringing peace to the world:
USE="-war" emerge --newuse @world
My shared code repository: https://code.pa4wdh.nl.eu.org
Music, Free as in Freedom: https://www.jamendo.com |
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Fitzcarraldo
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Zucca
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| Posted: Fri Dec 15, 2017 11:11 am Post subject: |
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In my experience Brother printers have been quite Linux friendly. Open drivers if not from Brother itself then via 3rd party. Although I'm not sure about the all-in-ones. :|
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charles17
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Joined: 02 Mar 2008
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| Posted: Fri Dec 15, 2017 2:37 pm Post subject: |
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| Zucca wrote: | | In my experience Brother printers have been quite Linux friendly. |
Only some few of these are fully open source  |
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Zucca
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| Posted: Fri Dec 15, 2017 9:17 pm Post subject: |
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| charles17 wrote: | | Zucca wrote: | | In my experience Brother printers have been quite Linux friendly. |
Only some few of these are fully open source :-( |
When I chose my printer I made sure it had drivers for Linux provided by the manufacturer in case if open source drivers would fail. So yeah. But my experience with it (the printer is in the attic atm) has been almost perfect. Only one PC on my network had problems when printing text - it overflowed and got cut. So the problem was in the client side. Somewhere in cups.
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pa4wdh
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Joined: 16 Dec 2005
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| Posted: Wed Dec 20, 2017 10:07 am Post subject: |
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Thanks for all the replies.
In the mean time i've been searching for alternatives, and since (color)laser seems to be troublesome i've been looking at inkjet based printers. I found the HP OfficeJet 3830 is supported by HPLIP without any binary stuff (accoording to the list on their site), does anyone have any experiences to share ?
Thanks in advance !
_________________
The gentoo way of bringing peace to the world:
USE="-war" emerge --newuse @world
My shared code repository: https://code.pa4wdh.nl.eu.org
Music, Free as in Freedom: https://www.jamendo.com |
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fturco
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| Posted: Wed Dec 20, 2017 12:12 pm Post subject: |
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I would not completely trust HPLIP website with the binary plugin problem. I did that and I had to return the printer back to the seller. 
I suggest you to ask for confirmation here. You may also try to search Google for Linux people having the same printer. |
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pa4wdh
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Joined: 16 Dec 2005
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| Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2018 12:19 pm Post subject: |
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I recently came across Epson printers, and they seem to do better than i thought. They have GPL'ed drivers for most of their models without any binary stuff and seem to be included in the standard portage tree.
Their XP-860 model seems to fit my needs (except that it's inket instead of laser). It can also print/scan from/to an SD card, so in case the drivers get completely messed up i can always use that route and completely bypass the drivers that way.
_________________
The gentoo way of bringing peace to the world:
USE="-war" emerge --newuse @world
My shared code repository: https://code.pa4wdh.nl.eu.org
Music, Free as in Freedom: https://www.jamendo.com |
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Ant P.
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Joined: 18 Apr 2009
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| Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2018 2:00 pm Post subject: |
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| If you want something that works, look for an office laser printer with Postscript (PCL) and ethernet. It'll be more expensive initially, but you should break even in running costs after about 25 pages. Or sooner if you factor in “time is money”… |
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pa4wdh
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Joined: 16 Dec 2005
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| Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2018 3:55 pm Post subject: |
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I agree that standards like PCL are the way to go. So far the only printers i found are made for heavy office use and are huge in physical size and costs.
Do you have a suggestion for a printer ?
_________________
The gentoo way of bringing peace to the world:
USE="-war" emerge --newuse @world
My shared code repository: https://code.pa4wdh.nl.eu.org
Music, Free as in Freedom: https://www.jamendo.com |
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Spargeltarzan
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Joined: 23 Jul 2017
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| Posted: Wed Jan 03, 2018 3:34 pm Post subject: |
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I bought the HP Officejet Pro 6970 and I compiled hplip with "net-print/hplip hpcups snmp" as package.use. Printing and Scanning works.
I even don't see something for binary plugins in hplip - but I guess my system is vulnerable free now since I didn't activate something? (unfortunately only now I saw this thread, after buying the printer...)
ADD: I didn't need to install the masked hplip-plugin, so for this printer it seems to be all open source.
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Spargeltarzan
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pa4wdh
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| Posted: Wed Jan 03, 2018 6:32 pm Post subject: |
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Thanks for sharing your experience Spargeltarzan, this model is very interesting and seems better for my type of use.
_________________
The gentoo way of bringing peace to the world:
USE="-war" emerge --newuse @world
My shared code repository: https://code.pa4wdh.nl.eu.org
Music, Free as in Freedom: https://www.jamendo.com |
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Spargeltarzan
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| Posted: Wed Jan 03, 2018 8:06 pm Post subject: |
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You are welcome - Today my printer arrived, so it's my first hours of testing. If you are patient I can give you more feedback after some days of usage, but I can definitely say I printed and scanned without the plugin packages.
I would be interested to "scan to PC (folder)" directly from the printer, but it seems this function is only available for Windows and Mac from HP generally. (Maybe with a samba server it will work) - If not, I have got a virtualized Windows and will use it with that. If you don't care of it, with SANE you can scan normally as I wrote.
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Spargeltarzan
Notebook: Lenovo YOGA 900-13ISK: Gentoo stable amd64, GNOME systemd, KVM/QEMU
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Elleni
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| Posted: Wed Jan 03, 2018 9:27 pm Post subject: |
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| After many years of using hp printers, some years ago I bought a canon pixma mg5150 printer, and am satisfied with it. The only thing, I had to change from default settings so colours are correctly printed is to change colour model from rgb to cmyk. |
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pa4wdh
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| Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2018 10:35 am Post subject: |
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Spargeltarzan, i can wait a few days and i'm looking forward to your feedback.
For me "Scan to PC" on the printer doesn't matter, PC initiated scanning or scanning to memory card are more important to me.
_________________
The gentoo way of bringing peace to the world:
USE="-war" emerge --newuse @world
My shared code repository: https://code.pa4wdh.nl.eu.org
Music, Free as in Freedom: https://www.jamendo.com |
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Cyker
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| Posted: Mon Jan 08, 2018 10:53 pm Post subject: |
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Oooh tricky... Printing isn't too bad if you avoid inkjets: Most laser printers, both mono and colour, support Adobe's PS (PostScript) and Hewlett Packard's PCL5/6 (Printer Command Language) which is pretty well supported in the opensource world - You may miss out on some 'advanced' features that the binary drivers provide, but for basic printing they do well.
If you get one that can be connected over Ethernet, then you don't even have to worry about the weird custom USB drivers that some printers need!
Scanning is bit more of a PITA as there isn't really anything that could be considered a standard; Heck, I still can't get network scanning to work properly on my Canon inkjet on my Windows machine! I just scan to USB stick or SD card because it just works...! |
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pa4wdh
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| Posted: Tue Jan 09, 2018 1:34 pm Post subject: |
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Very true Cyker, the lack of a proper standard makes it hard to choose the right one.
@Spargeltarzan: Do you already have a few experiences to share ?
_________________
The gentoo way of bringing peace to the world:
USE="-war" emerge --newuse @world
My shared code repository: https://code.pa4wdh.nl.eu.org
Music, Free as in Freedom: https://www.jamendo.com |
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chiefbag
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| Posted: Tue Jan 09, 2018 4:08 pm Post subject: |
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| Spargeltarzan wrote: | | I would be interested to "scan to PC (folder)" directly from the printer, but it seems this function is only available for Windows and Mac from HP generally. (Maybe with a samba server it will work) |
Yes if you setup Samba on a server or locally you can use a share as the Scan Target, works fine. |
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Spargeltarzan
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Joined: 23 Jul 2017
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| Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2018 2:20 pm Post subject: |
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pa4wdh,
I use this printer on two Gentoo PCs and after some days of testing I do not find any issues. A bit annoying that the lid doesn't open automatically, so when you print you will have to open it manually unless you don't want that your pages fall down - or you let it open... Don't know why HP made it like this. But that's not a reason to dismiss this printer...
Hope I helped you!
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Spargeltarzan
Notebook: Lenovo YOGA 900-13ISK: Gentoo stable amd64, GNOME systemd, KVM/QEMU
Desktop-PC: Intel Core i7-4770K, 8GB Ram, AMD Radeon R9 280X, ZFS Storage, GNOME openrc, Dantrell, Xen |
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pa4wdh
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| Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2018 9:25 pm Post subject: |
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I bought the same printer (HP OfficeJet Pro 6970) and I can confirm that it works without any binary plugins, all features seem to work nicely.
I'm using net-print/hplip-3.17.10 and there seems to be a bug in the sane backend called hpaio. As a result of the bug the scanner is only usable from the local machine (connected to the scanner) and not via the network (via saned).
I made a simple but effective patch to fix this, and if you want you can place it in /etc/portage/patches/net-print/hplip-3.17.10/hpaio-no-localOnly.patch and re-merge hplip to have it applied.
| Code: | --- hplip-3.17.10/scan/sane/hpaio.c 2017-10-13 10:39:38.000000000 +0200
+++ hplip-3.17.10-mod/scan/sane/hpaio.c 2018-02-10 15:04:16.369654255 +0100
@@ -341,7 +341,7 @@
{
DBG(8, "sane_hpaio_get_devices(local=%d): %s %d\n", localOnly, __FILE__, __LINE__);
ResetDeviceList(&DeviceList);
- DevDiscovery(localOnly);
+ DevDiscovery(0);
*deviceList = (const SANE_Device **)DeviceList;
return SANE_STATUS_GOOD;
} |
_________________
The gentoo way of bringing peace to the world:
USE="-war" emerge --newuse @world
My shared code repository: https://code.pa4wdh.nl.eu.org
Music, Free as in Freedom: https://www.jamendo.com
Last edited by pa4wdh on Sat Feb 17, 2018 3:18 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Spargeltarzan
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Joined: 23 Jul 2017
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| Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2018 8:11 pm Post subject: |
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Many thank for your hint! I will try this patch, great, when this issue is fixed, I scan quite much!
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Spargeltarzan
Notebook: Lenovo YOGA 900-13ISK: Gentoo stable amd64, GNOME systemd, KVM/QEMU
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