USB Label Printers

PC-TECH

Has any used a stand alone USB label printer with SOLUS? If yes what brands work?
Thanks
Mark

WetGeek

PC-TECH Has any used a stand alone USB label printer with SOLUS?

I have a Brother P-Touch label printer that I've always used with Windows, because they provide drivers and editor software only for Windows and Mac. I've pursued more than one option for using it on Linux, but nothing has been a good solution so far.

I've heard of a Linux driver that's available from a third party, but not editor software. Because printing on labels isn't much like printing on sheets of paper, having a driver that could talk to the label maker wouldn't do me much good by itself. I'd need an editor that could handle parameters like tape width, label length, and so on.

Also, it would need to be built, which might lead to who-knows-how-many hours of problems locating required dependencies and hoping that none of them would be in conflict with anything in Solus. And finally, I still have one computer that can be booted into Windows, so although it's inconvenient, I do have a way to print labels. Thus, I've spent a limited amount of time and energy looking for a different solution.

If you have a way to run Windows in a VM on Solus, that might be a way to run a P-Touch label printer from Solus. And the label printer is definitely high quality, and very versatile. I didn't go that way because I'd need to buy another Windows 10 license in order to do that. Since I do have a way to run one of my computers on Windows (see above), I didn't go very far with that idea.

So that's my P-Touch adventure. I hadn't thought of buying a different brand of label printer yet, but if one were available with good Linux support, I'd be inclined to buy one. If you have any luck finding one, would you please be sure to let us know here? I'll look, too, and if I have any success, I'll report it here. Good luck with that!

WetGeek

PC-TECH USB label printer with SOLUS

UPDATE: I spent a good part of the morning on a continued web search, and indeed some things have changed since the last time I looked. Brother has more versions of label printers, and for at least one of them they offer Linux drivers (and presumably a label editor) in .deb and .rpm formats. How easily one of those could be used to install the driver on Solus, I don't know. It could be relatively simple, or it could be a nightmare, and I wouldn't know until I'd bought the printer (serial no. required to download software) and tried to adapt the driver. That's not appealing to me, however for someone without a current working alternative (you?), it might be more attractive.

There are other articles on building CUPS drivers, including one that has an 11-page instruction guide for building it. Not complicated at all. 😀

At this point, I'm going to change my focus to locating one of the environments for running Windows games on Linux, that might also work with the label editor from Brother. I tried WINE briefly, but without success. Not a "gamer," I'm unfamiliar with the rest of the emulators and other software used for running Windows games on Linux.

Attempting to run under WINE, I ran into a problem with a missing mfc.dll (Microsoft Foundation Classes). At the time I didn't go any farther with it, although I'm sure I can find versions of that DLL on my workstation. I have Visual Studio versions from 2003 to 2015 installed on that machine. I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who's successfully run mfc-based Windows software with WINE.

For reasons I've explained before, this whole project isn't at the top of my to-do list. To print labels now, I need to shut down my workstation, swap out the Solus SSD, swap in the Windows 10 SSD, boot up Windows, and often as not, update the Brother editor. Then I can create and print the labels, shut down the workstation, swap out the Windows 10 SSD, swap in the Solus SSD, restart, and return to where I was. As much of a pain in the butt as that is, I need to do it only infrequently,

This one application is the only remaining use case that isn't handled here by Solus. Finding a Solus solution for it would mean that I can finally divorce us entirely from Windows. I'm pretty sure that would be very good for my mental health.

davidjharder

WetGeek OT: From reading your comments for a while, I feel like you have a basement with nothing but hardware in it 🤣

WetGeek

davidjharder Hi, David. Our house doesn't have a basement, sadly, but if it did, you'd probably be right. As it is, we have computers in three rooms ... her office, my office, and the living room.

HPF-84E

There are drivers for DYMO in the repository. To make sure the driver works properly I would choose a device that has been on the market for 2 years. 😉

eopkg sr dymo dymo-cups-drivers - CUPS drivers for Dymo labelwriters dymo-cups-drivers-dbginfo - Debug symbols for dymo-cups-drivers

You have to create and edit the labels with LibreOffice or with glabels anyway.
But I can't contribute more than that. I was only interested in this topic.

Greetings

PC-TECH

HPF-84E Thanks

Axios

I tried the dymo label writer had problems couldnt get things to work right. so i just installed it on my win machine
its so easy there to use program wise I mean. But that was 2 years ago things might have changed. Avery labels is now online maybe make labels there and print in linux? (Dunno interesting thought)

SOLUSfiddler

I can definitely recommend the software "glabels" - it's a label/business card editor and it works quite flawlessly.
I can imagine it might also work well with something like DYMO label printers:
It has an abundance of preconfigured formats for all kinds of labels that you can pick from or you can create your own format when designing a label.