TecSpy.com Michael Erskine's Domain

I bought a printer last night - its one of those all-in-one scanner/printer/copier ones
Its a HP F2180 I think - £30 from Wilco's!
I've been looking for a HP printer for a while - due to excellent support from hplip and the nightmare of trying to get a Lexmark Z27(?) inkjet to work on Feisty/Gutsy

Before opening the box I made sure that it was supported on http://hplip.sourceforge.net/supported_devices/inkjet_aio.html although I knew prior to purchase that there are only a few HP printers that don't have good Linux support.

Plugged it all in, popped in the cartridges, no USB cable supplied but luckily I have a few knocking around. The quick start guide said I had to put paper in before loading the carts and then I found out why: as soon as the carts go in it prints a test sheet that you are supposed to scan adn it uses that for calibration (somehow!) - I was slow in finding some A4 so I only got half a sheet of test image so I had to skip that step - there seemed to be no way to repeat the calibration process (well, not from the quick start sheet or the buttons on top). This is all before connecting the the computer so there's no onscreen instruction.

After reading http://hplip.sourceforge.net/install/install/index.html I plugged in the USB, popped open the HPLIP tool thingy that was in my System menu (this is Ubuntu Gutsy with kubuntu-desktop) and it presented a list with a single printer to choose from - the right model, so picked that entry. Then a list of available drivers popped up with two enrties which looked the same except one had a full pathname and both were labelled "recommended" - I picked the top one. Then it asked if I weanted to print a test sheet - Yes - it prints and looks great. Then there's a sort of "what next?" page which offers scanning too - so I picked scan and XSane pops up so I played with that for an hour or so (I'm quite familiar with XSane).

The scanner is brilliant - scanned some old photos for my halfpipeandslippers.com gallery http://www.halfpipeandslippers.com/g/v/chilwell-scans/

Tonight I teach the other family members how to use it - they're interested in the photocopying feature without having to involve the PC.