CUPS (http://www.cups.org/) provides its own concept of printer drivers with one main intention of separating the PostScript interpreter from the driver, so that the driver does not need to be compiled into GhostScript. This makes installing a new driver much easier and allows drivers to be propriatary whereas the GhostScript in use is free software. Images can even be printed without the PostScript detour.
The concept is simple: GhostScript produces a universal raster format, the CUPS raster format and pipes this into a CUPS raster driver which converts the bitmaps into the printer's native language. If an image is sent for printing, CUPS calls the imagetoraster filter to convert the image directly to the CUPS raster format. GhostScript is not called then.
The disadvantage of this concept is that except CUPS only PPR (http://ppr.sf.net/) supports these drivers. Users of other spoolers could not make use of CUPS raster drivers up to now.
As CUPS is the standard spooler in all modern Linux distributions, manufacturers start to issue binary-only CUPS raster drivers (as Lexmark for their inkjets for example). This makes these printers unusable for LPRng, LPD, PDQ, CPS, or spooler-less users.
To remedy this and to even recommend certain CUPS raster drivers on linuxprinting.org (a recommended driver should work with all spoolers) I have added support for CUPS raster drivers in foomatic-rip and I want to ask you to test this with LPRng.
Proceed as follows:
- Install the CUPS libraries libcups and libcupsimage (in your distro usually in packages like "libcups", "libcups2", or similar) and if you want to compile GhostScript and/or the raster driver, install also the header package ("libcups-devel", "libcups-dev", "cupsys-dev", or similar). If you prefer to compile the CUPS library from source, you need the CUPS package from http://www.cups.org/, but you do not need to run the CUPS daemon, only the libraries are needed.
- Check whether your GhostScript has the "cups" device. Do
gs -h | grep cups
and you should get output. Otherwise you should install ESP GhostScript (for example "espgs" from Debian or the source from http://www.cups.org/ghostscript.php).
- Install the CUPS raster driver. It should be located in a directory named /usr/lib/cups/filter/, /usr/local/lib/cups/filter/, or/opt/cups/filter/ and it must be world-executable. If you install from an RPM and rpm complains about missing CUPS, do "rpm -Uvh --nodeps ..." to install the package.
- Proceed as described on
http://www.linuxprinting.org/lpd-doc.html
using the PPD file of the CUPS raster driver as your printer was a native PostScript printer. Use the most current foomatic-rip, as I added the CUPS raster driver support only two days ago. Foomatic 3.0.1rc1 contains the correct foomatic-rip.
Alternatively, you can use foomatic-configure (preferrably with both foomatic-db-engine and foomatic-filters being version 3.0.1rc1 or newer) with the "--ppd" option using the PPD file of your CUPS raster driver.
CUPS raster drivers for testing:
- GIMP-Print (http://gimp-print.sf.net/)
- The sample drivers in the CUPS package (http://www.cups.org/)
- Turboprint (http://www.turboprint.de/)
- Proprietary Linux drivers of newer Lexmark printers (http://www.lexmark.com/)
- Samsung's Linux drivers (ex: http://downloadcenter.samsung.com/content/DR/200308/20030828132149359_lpp-1.0.6.i386.tar.gz)
Please report any bug or problem.
Happy printing.
Till
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