You haven't been able to find HP printers that are Linux compatible? I find that hard to believe. I have one and it works great, in fact I have two hooked up and they work great. As far as cheap ink. Well, there in lies the problem of your request. As has been said the current selection of cheap printers all have expensive ink. You might want to google for "inexpensive ink printers review Linux" or something like that to find reviews of cost to maintain ink jet printers. If you want a good printer, supported by Linux and cheap ink. Find an older HP LaserJet in some of the area used PC shops. I have an older LaserJet II or III (can't remember). I paid $25 for it, It's big and it is jamming, so you have to disassemble and clean it good. As is it'll will take one page at a time fed in manually. I've been to lazy to clean it. Ink isn't cheap, but last for a long time so comparatively it's cheap. It's yours if you want it. I have a Canon BJ 10e you can have, no charge. It's DOS compatible, cheap ink, slow, small footprint, old. I'm not even sure it does letter quality. I'd hate to feed it a 50 page document. I have a Lexmark 4 color printer, ink is not cheap, and I think you'd have to set it up in Windows and install the software to diagnose why it's suddenly printing in reverse colors. Lexmark does have a closed source driver for it, and there are open source drivers for it too. You could always use it as a black ink printer. It's fairly fast, and costs more than $50 new. You can have that one too, I keep it around saying someday I'm going to diagnose what is wrong with it. It's a nice printer and prints excellent quality photos with photo ink. If you can get it to work properly.

Brian Densmore

-----Original Message----- From: Leo Mauler

Basically I'm wanting to set up a home Linux printer server just so I can say I've done it once.

I'm looking around for a $50 or less printer which is Linux compatible (I'd take "DOS compatibility mode") or even has Linux drivers. The printers I've been able to find in that range (Canon, HP, Lexmark) all seem to have neither DOS compatibility mode nor Linux drivers.

I have about $50 to spend so I won't be able to take advantage of "this is the price after a mail-in rebate" pricing. I'd take a used printer if the cartridges aren't too hard to find and/or too expensive.