On December 7, 2024 4:21 PM, I wrote: > If you are able, please recommend a black-and-white Postscript laser > printer that will work well with Debian (Bookworm). ...
With advice from the group, I bought a Brother DCP-L2640DW driverless monochrome printer/scanner. I run the fvwm window manager and can print with lp and scan with xsane. I never installed the Brother printer, scanner, or BR-Script3 drivers. So I'm mostly happy, but I can't say I really understand who's doing what. Here are three questions. 1. Formerly (but still Bookworm), I had an HP LaserJet 5MP connected with a USB-to-parallel adapter. I saw this character special device: crw-rw---- 1 root lp 180, 1 Dec 3 08:53 /dev/usb/lp1 I would typically print with something like "cat file > /dev/usb/lp1". Now, though, with the new laser and a straight USB connection (no wireless), I see these in /dev/usb: crw------- 1 root root 180, 0 Dec 3 08:53 /dev/usb/hiddev0 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9796 Dec 21 13:01 /dev/usb/lp1 (The first of these is dated before I even changed printers and so may be irrelevant.) If I cat a file to the new lp1, nothing happens. I don't even know if CUPS is using this lp1. What's going on with the device stubs? 2. I have a virtualbox Windows XP machine. With the HP printer, it worked through CUPS and needed to find /dev/lp0. So I just made a symbolic link from that to /dev/usb/lp1. XP had a driver for the old HP. Now, though, the devices and the printer have changed. In XP, I can choose from a long list of prehistoric printer drivers. Does that even matter with a driverless printer? I also suspect the new device stub won't work from XP. I don't really need to print from XP, but it was sometimes convenient. 3. With xscan, the scan quality is good enough for most purposes. But when I tested some fine engraving (like a dollar bill), it was less sharp than I get with my old Epson Perfection 2400 (from 2004). In both cases I asked for 300 dpi and set JPG quality as high as possible. The Brother at 600 dpi didn't match the Epson at 300 dpi. Would installing the Brother scanner driver be an improvement, or is this just a limitation of the hardware? Thanks for getting me this far and for any further advice you may have.
