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View Full Version : Free Software Saved Me



Daniel G. Taylor
January 19th, 2005, 08:43 PM
As many of you may or may not know, I am the proud owner of an iBook G4 (http://www.apple.com/ibook/) and I had to do some printing to my HP Photosmart 7350 (http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/hpphotosmart7350/) from the iBook.

I wrote up my schedule in NeoOffice/J (http://neooffice.org) and tried to print. Printer connection error or something along those lines is what I got. 8-[ I should probably note that I was using HP's proprietary Mac OSX drivers for the printer. Just like the Microsoft Windows version they come with a steaming heap of applications and utilities that I don't want or need. To top it off they also use old installers and interfaces so they don't really fit into the rest of OSX.

Well, after spending half an hour searching for a solution to the problem, I happened upon HPIJS for Mac OSX (http://www.linuxprinting.org/macosx/hpijs/). HPIJS (http://hpinkjet.sourceforge.net/) is an effort by HP (http://hp.com) and the free software community to create and maintain free print drivers. They are released under the GNU General Public License, and currently support over 450 printers, using cups as the printing backend (which Mac OSX and Ubuntu both use). These are the exact same drivers I use in my desktop machine running Ubuntu.

A few minutes later I am printing out my report using the HPIJS print drivers. Free software, you have saved me again. :razz:

Anyone have a similar story?

poofyhairguy
January 20th, 2005, 12:19 AM
As many of you may or may not know, I am the proud owner of an iBook G4 (http://www.apple.com/ibook/) and I had to do some printing to my HP Photosmart 7350 (http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/hpphotosmart7350/) from the iBook.

I wrote up my schedule in NeoOffice/J (http://neooffice.org) and tried to print. Printer connection error or something along those lines is what I got. 8-[ I should probably note that I was using HP's proprietary Mac OSX drivers for the printer. Just like the Microsoft Windows version they come with a steaming heap of applications and utilities that I don't want or need. To top it off they also use old installers and interfaces so they don't really fit into the rest of OSX.

Well, after spending half an hour searching for a solution to the problem, I happened upon HPIJS for Mac OSX (http://www.linuxprinting.org/macosx/hpijs/). HPIJS (http://hpinkjet.sourceforge.net/) is an effort by HP (http://hp.com) and the free software community to create and maintain free print drivers. They are released under the GNU General Public License, and currently support over 450 printers, using cups as the printing backend (which Mac OSX and Ubuntu both use). These are the exact same drivers I use in my desktop machine running Ubuntu.

A few minutes later I am printing out my report using the HPIJS print drivers. Free software, you have saved me again. :razz:

Anyone have a similar story?

Yea! I love HP printer drivers!

Free software probably saved my soul more than anything. I would always pirate windows programs, and even though I felt bad about it, I still did it anyway! With OSS I get to try all the software I want without the guilt or the dialoges saying "you have 14 days left in this trial."