Mohtalim

Here's the situation. Amber has a laptop. She must print a lot for her job. She has an old inkjet from something like 1997. For a while, I had it shared on my main box, but that was a hassle because then we had to turn it on to print (and sometimes I keep the network adapter on the Linux box). I installed cups and samba on the Linux box and have the printer shared there now. For whatever reason, it's not very stable and can take several attempts to get real output.

It is a parallel port printer, and of course Amber's new laptop doesn't have the legacy ports. So we can't plug it in directly.

For these reasons, we are looking to buy a new printer. We already have a scanner, we don't need a fax, and we don't own a digital camera. Therefore, I don't think we want a multifunction device. I'm thinking we probably just want a cheap inkjet or laser printer. Price per page is a factor. Color and graphics quality is an extra, but not a must. Text quality is most important. We don't want to spend more than $200, either.

Network topology is the key. I'm not sure what the best solution is, but here's what I've thought of:

• Buy a printer with Linux support. Install on the Linux box and share using samba.

• Buy a printer with 802.11b support. Set it up and let it associate with our AP.

• Buy a printer and one of those wireless printer servers and plug them in.

An Ethernet-enabled printer probably will not work, because the access point (and hub) is in our bedroom, and we definitely aren't going to run any cat5 across our hallway or have a printer in our bedroom.

So, does anyone know anything about printers? If I can find a quality printer with built-in 802.11b support for under $200, I'd probably choose that first, as it requires the least fiddling. We're probably going to go to Fry's so we can look at printers sometime soon.

Uh, are there even printers with built in wireless? I know a person who uses the linksys wireless print server with no hassles. Just find yourself a parallel port printer with quality and all that fits what you want, hook it up to the print server, and go to town printing.

I don't know much about printing, but if she's doing a lot of black and white printing, you may as well go for a laser printer since it'll do that the cheapest by far per page. If you want to do color, I have no clue, but you're gonna be spending a small fortune on ink pretty quickly. CMU cluster services has been bitching that it's the toner that's so expensive to keep replacing and is the reason they're trying to get people to only print what they're going to pick up.

Yes, there are network-ready printers with 802.11b support. They're fairly new. It's not obvious whether it's cheaper than buying a print server. Fry's is having some kinda rebate deal on Netgear print servers. The Linksys one costs $117, which is a bit pricey.