Putting Together A Linux Office

Linux Driver Support Critical
The decision to select an HP All-In-One printer over competing vendors was fairly easy because, on SourceForge.net, HP sponsors an open-source effort called the HP Linux Imaging and Printing (HPLIP) project that makes available more than 1,000 printer drivers. The HPLIP staff develops and maintains most of HP's printer drivers, and this is one of the largest single vendor driver Web sites on the Internet for the Linux community.

Priced at $499, HP's OfficeJet Pro L7780 is a good choice for a small-office multifunction device. It comes with wired and wireless networking, a second 350-sheet paper tray, color graphics display, duplexer and a legal-size glass surface for scanning documents. Unfortunately, the SUSE Enterprise distribution installed on the server we received did not arrive with an HPLIP command-line or toolbox software package, so engineers had to download and run the HPLIP installer package in order to get the server to recognize and work with the HP OfficeJet Pro L7780.

HP claims that on distributions such as SUSE Standard, Novell loads the HPLIP package and free OSes such as Ubuntu should come with HP print drivers loaded. However, the Test Center could only find older OfficeJet drivers on the SUSE distro.

Options For Scanning Documents
Customers that need to run batch scanning from the ML115 Linux server or a SUSE Linux desktop can use command-line utilities such as scanimage. From the graphical desktop environment, called KDE, users can access Kooka to scan images via the user interface. Kooka has an OCR interface as well. To convert text from scanned images using the command line, Google's open-source Tesseract OCR program is extremely useful.

Despite all the command-line utilities available on SUSE and Linux in general, most of these tools are difficult to learn and master. Undoubtedly, solution providers will find it difficult to convince Windows users to work with the Linux command line. To wean customers off Windows, solution providers will need to find tools that work with the user interface whenever possible.

The HP OfficeJet Pro comes with nonvolatile memory so it can receive and store faxes even with the power off. It also comes with read/write thumb drive readers that allow users to scan images into a memory card. The easiest way to get around using command-line scan tools on Linux is to use USB-based memory card readers. Since HP's printer supports various card formats, users can easily scan multiple images into a thumb drive and then pass them to a reader on a Linux desktop system.

Another of the printer's benefits is that it was designed with stationary ink cartridges, allowing HP to sell large ink cartridges and reduce the cost of the inks. HP charges about $25 for large color cartridges.

The L7780 also comes with an embedded Web server that allows users to scan network folders for batch processing. This feature is only available on the L7700 series. Since the Web server supports Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, engineers were able to access it through the ML115 Linux server. However, HP's ReadIris Pro OCR software is only available on Windows and Mac OSX. The L7780 can convert documents into PDFs, JPEGs and even OCR images. After selecting a folder, users select a file type and naming convention and the built-in scanner does the rest.

Next: Migrating To OpenOffice Can Be Tedious