[clug] Foolishly fiddling with a GDI printer

Alex Satrapa grail at goldweb.com.au
Thu Nov 17 20:27:14 MST 2011


On 18/11/2011, at 14:13 , Mike Carden wrote:

> Yesterday I foolishly bought a cheap, cheap colour printer. It's a
> Fuji Xerox CP205 'laser' (LED actually) device with an Ethernet port.
> I became all excited about the prospect of parking it on my home LAN
> and making it available to everyone to print on.
> 
> It was only after I bought it that I realised its cheap price would be
> because it's a Windows GDI printer. Purchasing fail. On the up side,
> my daughter's Win7 laptop prints to it just fine.

Take the printer back, get a refund.

You might end up being able to print to it from your FOSS operating system, but all you're really doing is reinforcing the view of marketing types all over the world that Windows GDI printers make them money.

Every time you buy a printer designed specifically for Windows, you validate that form of peripheral design.

Sorry to get all Stallman on you, but this is the way the world works. You are advancing their cause, regardless of how cleverly you subvert their designs to your own purposes.

Alex



More information about the linux mailing list