for Brother HL-1440, one driver is "recommended," but another is default

Ben Crowell cupscrowell07 at lightandmatter.com
Sat Jun 9 16:13:30 PDT 2007


This is in CUPS 1.2.8, on Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn, x64, Brother HL-1440 printer via USB.

When I add the printer via the web interface, there is one driver marked "recommended" and "foomatic," and another driver marked "Gutenprint." The default selection in the menu is the Gutenprint one. It seems inconsistent to me that the one that's marked recommended is not the one that's the default. If it's recommended, then it should be the default.

My experience is that the foomatic one works, and the Gutenprint one doesn't, so I think the right solution is to make the foomatic one the default, as well as marking it "recommended." (When I say the Gutenprint one doesn't work, I mean that, e.g., it won't print a pdf file using command-line lpr printing, and won't print from OpenOffice. In both these cases, it hangs up the printer, hangs up cups, and requires power-cycling of the printer in order to recover.)

Also, the menu of drivers doesn't automatically scroll to show you the one that's selected by default, so it's very easy not to notice the fact that one is preselected. Since CUPS automatically detects  the model of the printer, I also don't see the point in giving such a long list of drivers, including many drivers for other model numbers. Javascript actually gives a nice way to handle all this: there's a mechanism for making a pop-up menu, where the default choice is the only one being displayed, unless the user clicks on the menu to select something different.




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