Multifunction laser printers for Fedora 14 ?

[Kevin J. Cummings]

On 12/06/2010 06:51 PM, Davide Bolcioni wrote:
> Greetings,
> I am looking for a multifunction (print and scan, fax is a don't care) laser 
> printer for Fedora 14 (not ink jet). I remembered that HP offered good support
> for Linux, but according to the HPLIP pages most recent printers need a 
> proprietary plugin, and it looks like a trend, so I'm looking elsewhere.

Yeup, hplip for the lasers, hpijs for the inkjets....

> I am specifically interested in stuff which doesn't require me to download 
> proprietary software, turn off SELinux or other shenanigans. Compilation and 
> configuration, on the other hand, are not a problem.

Straight PostScript support?  PCL?  Both are open but still proprietary.

> A friend running Ubuntu suggested me the Samsung SCX-4300 or SCX-4600, is 
> anybody using them under Fedora 14 or earlier with good results ?

Even Samsung lasers require the use of a plugin/driver in order to work
properly.  It was recently mentioned in the thread "Samsung Laser
Printers - proprietary Page Description Language (ML-1665)" that Samsung
printers all use SPL (Samsung Printer Language) to talk to their
printers.  Samsung provides a "Unified Print Driver" which works on
Fedora, but it would seem to be another instance of what you are afraid
of.  OTOH, there is an open source project to support SPLix, and some
printers are better supported than others (YMMV).

> Thank you in advance,
> Davide Bolcioni

AFA the scanner support, you are probably looking for scanners that are
SANE compliant and will work the the freely available SANE software that
Fedora supplies.

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at rcn.com
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)