We needed a Thermal Transfer printer for printing out patient labels with bar codes in our hospitals. After a long search, we found the TSC TTP-244 plus. I had got so used to installing stuff on Ubuntu without a driver that I was taken aback when it could not be installed. Searching the download section of the TSC Website, I noticed a driver for Fedora 10 and wondered whether it would work on Karmic as we had bought three expensive printers and the deadline for the deployment of our Hospital Information System was fast approaching. I did not want to start using Windows again by  paying Rs. 6500 plus taxes for each Windows license. (as the plan was to switch the network to Ubuntu at a substantial cost saving ) It did however work on the Karmic Koala and that was a relief! Here is how I went about it.

• Download the Linux driver from http://www.tscprinters.com by clicking on Driver & Software under the Download section.
• The driver is identified as “For Linux under Fedora 10″
• Save this file to your Desktop and unzip the folder
• Open a terminal window and cd Desktop\TSC_Linux_Fedora10\tscdriver-xyz where xyz is the version number of the driver
• Make the install script executable : chmod +x install-driver
• sudo ./install-driver
• Type in your password and follow the instructions on screen
• You can add the printer in the normal way from System > Administration > Printing

You can configure the various label sizes etc from Preferences > TSC Printer Setting

TSC Thermal printer setup

We found the available label sizes available in the market for this printer too restrictive. They were either too small or too large for our requirement. It uses a wax ribbon which can be used only once. Will put down more feedback after we put it into a production environment.

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