Coats Sez

I got me one of these today. The C4680, that is. I had been thinking
lately about getting a printer, doing research on Google on which printers
work good with Linux. Everything I read said HP printers had real good
support on Linux so I did some searching to find out which ones might be
able to do the job for me at reasonable cost. I just wanted to print letters
occasionally and also send people some photos every once in a while. The
stores locally with HP printers in stock were Staples, Office Depot, and
Walmart. I went to Walmart first to see what they had and they did have
some printers that were on my list but I didn’t want to buy the first thing
I saw so I decided to make a trip to Office Depot and look at their selection.
The two stores are only a few blocks apart.

Office Depot had the biggest selection of HP printers and several that
were on my list so I looked and thought for a while and finally decided on
the HP C4680. Not too cheap but not real expensive either. The C4680 was
$92.41 with a promotional discount. I also bought some photo paper, general
purpose paper, and some extra ink cartridges. The C4680 uses the 60-series
black and tri-color ink cartridges. I also got a USB cable as this printer
does not come with one.

After I got my printer home I got the instructions out and read thru them
to get an idea of what to do to get started. I mainly wanted to know how to
load the ink cartridges. A lot of the instructions assumed that the user is
using Windows so I just skimmed over those parts since I use Ubuntu Linux
here.

The printer was not hard to set up. I plugged in the USB cable and hooked
up the power supply and turned it on. The printer has a builtin LCD screen
and I just followed the instructions on that to get started. It walked me thru
installing the ink cartridges and printing a test page to use in the scanner
part of the device. The test page was to align the printer’s print heads. After
I got done with that I booted up my computer to see what would happen. I
got booted up but after doing some checking I could not find the printer
recognized anywhere. After a bit, though, I realized that was my fault. I didn’t
have the cups system started. I ran Ubuntu’s Bootup-Manager and enabled
the cups system and told it to start it up. After a few seconds I got a popup
window which told me that my printer had been recognized and did I want
to print a test page. My printer was even recognized by model number. I
had it print the test page and my printer started up and printed a page with
the Ubuntu logo and some color tests on it. Hooray, I’m in business!

It took me a while to figure out how to print photos and get them centered
on the photo paper but I’ve never had a printer before and am a newbie at
it. I eventually got it though so now I can write letters and send photos to
relatives and friends.

So, now you know that this model printer will work on Ubuntu 9.10 Linux just fine.
Oh, and the scanner part of it works just fine with the xsane scanner program
also. I did some test scans to check it out. The hplip driver on this system
is 3.9.8-1ubuntu2 so this is the driver I know works. I have no idea about
older drivers.

teryc