HP LaserJet 1220 Laser Printer/Copier/Scanner

For laser printing, I have an HP LaserJet 1220 attached to the parallel port of my Linux machine. It was very simple to set this up under Linux using the printtool. The printer is supported, and I chose a ``postscript driver'' for it (the recommended driver, according to the LinuxPrinting.org database).

The printer seems to work on all black-and-white level-2 postscript documents. Unfortunately, sometimes color plots cause it to cough up an error code and abort the document. To solve this, I created a printer share in /etc/samba/smb.conf which exports the printer to Windows, then installed the HP software that came with the printer on Windows. For some reason, the installation software could not find the printer, even though it was visible when browsing my Linux machine under ``Network Places.'' I had to explicitly type in the path name to the printer share (\\<hostname>\hp-laserjet-1220) during the driver installation. This did solve the color printing problem: now colors are converted to gray levels as one would expect.

Here is my printer share in /etc/samba/smb.conf:

[hp-laserjet-1220]
    comment = Linux laser printer/scanner/copier
    path = /var/spool/samba
    valid users = me
    browseable = yes
    read only = no
    guest ok = yes
    writable = no
    printable = yes
    user = me