Ville-Pekka Vainio's blog

The Linux/open source friendly printer we finally bought

A few days ago I wrote about trying to find a printer which works with open source drivers.

When discussing the purchase with my parents, they mentioned that they’d like to get a color printer for printing photos and such. So the printer we actually ended up getting for them is the HP CM1312 MFP. It is quite a bit more expensive than the monochrome ones but worth the extra price, IMO.

Apparently this printer has Postscript support, which probably helps a lot with Linux support. When I powered on the printer and then booted my parents’ Fedora 11 box, the printer automatically showed up in the “Printers” view (system-config-printer) and printing worked without any extra configuration.

HP claims that in order to be able to scan you’d need to download a proprietary plugin, but that’s false. Just make sure you have the libsane-hpaio package installed and that /etc/sane.d/dll.conf includes an “hpaio” line and scanning should work with programs such as xsane and GIMP.

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Ville-Pekka Vainio

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3 responses to “The Linux/open source friendly printer we finally bought”

  1. Bryan avatar
    Bryan

    Huh?
    The link you gave for HP’s “proprietary” plugin goes to HPLIP. HPLIP is licensed under GPL2 and is included in Fedora

  2. Steven avatar
    Steven

    Hey thanks for the feedback! I was looking for exactly the same type of device…I’ll probably take the same one not that I know it works 🙂

  3. Ville-Pekka Vainio avatar
    Ville-Pekka Vainio

    Bryan:

    On the page I linked to it says:

    “Driver Plugin Information:

    This printer REQUIRES a downloadable driver plug-in. Use hp-setup to install the printer, and to download and install the plug-in. In general, required driver plugins are required for printing support. Driver plug-ins are released under a proprietary (non-open) license and are not part of the HPLIP tarball release.”

    However, it seems like this proprietary plugin is not actually needed with this multifunction device on Fedora 11. Maybe the information on HP’s site is outdated…

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