Go ahead and try it!
While not directly related to performance and scalability, I just wanted to take a quick break to say that if you haven't checked out OpenSolaris 2008.11 now would be a good time to do so. I've been using it on a Lenovo T61p for months now and only through trying to do something that was, in retrospect, massively stupid have I had any problems with the system. Suspend/resume, wireless (including WAP), external monitor - these are things I consider a minimum in a laptop, and they're all there within the last few builds.
With my discovery today of gpodder, my quest to make the system do just about everything I'd like it to for a standard every-day system is nearing completion. All that's left now is to get my HP K5400 printer working and I'll be a right happy camper.
Update: Thanks to a push from Michael I discovered my mistake was not explicitly configuring CUPS as the active print service. Just for reference:
user@host:~$ print-service -q
active print service: lp
user@host:~$ print-service -s cups
disabling LP services...
enabling CUPS services...
user@host:~$ print-service -q
active print service: cups
After that, the printer works beautifully, including double-sided printing which was the primary reason I bought it in the first place.
If your HP printer has a USB interface - which I understand it should have, from hp's page - then you should be ready to run: just plug in, and voila! (that's how I now use my USB-capable printer with my OpenSolaris boxes).
HTH
Posted by Michael Schuster on December 16, 2008 at 09:16 AM EST #
Thanks for the idea, Michael, but this is a K5400 which has a builtin JetDirect and is sitting on another desk from my work system. While it does have a USB port I don't have a USB cable long enough. Under Linux I could get it to work using the hplip package set up for networking, but it appears to be a little more complicated under Solaris (including installing a different set of SNMP packages for networking support).
Posted by Frank Rival on December 16, 2008 at 10:30 AM EST #