Your
ML-3051N
is a lovely little 'network printer. Hopefully, it will serve us well in the
next few years as a replacement for the thirteen year old HP
Laserjet ML we bought (for about five times the price: a native postscript
printer was rather expensive in 1994) a long time ago. And you even mention
that it can talk to Linux! But still, I have a few things to talk
to you about:
- as you mention Linux, it's a tad odd that you enumerate various
flavours (RH 8 to 9; FC 1 to 3; Mandrake 9 to 10.2; SuSE 8.2 to 9.2) but
happen to exclude the two variants that run around here: Debian and its
cousin Ubuntu. Besides, the versions of those other flavours are a tad old,
no?
- as you ship Linux software on a cdrom, it is even odder that the
install shell script fails (note: spaces between
#! and
/bin/sh may
not be a good idea). Fails not once, but twice: you say
/bin/sh, but you meant
/bin/bash as you use features of the latter. Oh well, I guess
we all made
that mistake in our
youth. Irregardless, the software never installed. Which is a pity as this
would be about the first 'household appliance' I bought with native Linux
support. So close, and yet so far.
- the control panel is a cumbersome way to set a static IP and to turn
the odd protocol off.
- did I really have to install all this windoze stuff on my wife's laptop
just to learn that the printer does in fact have a nice web interface? You
could have mentioned that with Linux info, no? It is in fact a rather nice
and complete web interface.
- as you supply networking support, do you really have to enable every
possible protocol under the sun? I mean slp, snmp, multicast dns, dynamic
dns, raw tcp, ipp, ethertalk, netware ...? I still see my
cable modem go down 'seemingly randomly' rigth after I print even though I
now disabled just about everything but raw tcp to port 9100 as well as ipp
to 613. Still, dropping the cable connection just because the printer wakes
up is odd, isn't it?
- Cups, foomatic and all the other printing goodies do not yet know the
ML-3050 family, so we are making do with the ML-2151NPS settings for
postscript. Works fine, so I won't bother copying the ppd file from the
cdrom to the handful of computers around here.
Kind regards, Dirk
Updated to fix a markup error. And the shebang space is
standard, I am told.
Postscriptum: Turns out it was 'just' the power
surge. Putting the cable modem and the router onto a different wall outlet,
and a surge-protector and battery backup ups to boot, fixed the issue.
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