Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?
On Sun, Jun 08, 2014 at 05:08:11PM -0500, Dale wrote: Every time I upgrade CUPS or hplip, I go to a Konsole and type in hp-setup as root. A window pops up and I just set the printer up again, it's GUI based. So far, that has worked. Don't jinx it tho. lol If needed, I go to my web browser to CUPS and delete the printer first. I, too, have an HP printer (Laserjet 1000 from 2004, still with the original toner). Back in the days printing worked simply with cups and foo2zjs. Then along came hplip which drives me nuts nowadays: It’s another icon in the tray for a function that I use once in a blue moon. It needs some kind of binary plugin, but I don’t think it’s the printer firmware, because hplip already installs that into /usr/share/ Recently I had to download the plugin manually b/c a) it must be the same version as hplip and there was an hplip upgrade, and b) my PC cannot get online right now. The plugin’s URL was very generic, with no indication about a specific printer model. Then, nowadays, the system python is python 3. If that is the case, then the plugin installer will fail because it is a shellscript with an embedded tar which contains a python 2 script. And the GUI gives no clue to that cause of failure. -- Gruß | Greetings | Qapla’ Please do not share anything from, with or about me on any social network. “I want to be free!” said the string puppet and cut its strings. signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?
Good morning, Andreas! On Sun, Jun 08, 2014 at 07:15:36PM +0200, Andreas K. Huettel wrote: Am Sonntag, 8. Juni 2014, 17:48:09 schrieb Alan Mackenzie: . What is all this trying to tell me? I've tried for over an hour to make sense of it, but my eyes just glaze over. My best guess is that cups-filters and foomatic-filters are packages which can't be installed together. But I _need_ foomatic-filters - otherwise my printer doesn't print. Or do I? cups-filters seems to be needed by cups. What _are_ cups-filters and foomatic-filters? emerge -s is little help here. Why do I need both of them? * cups-filters is a former part of cups that provides file format conversions (among other things). Basically it (also) makes sure that everything is internally converted to PDF. It's not part of CUPS (as maintained by Apple) anymore, but hard-required by CUPS on Linux (and maintained by the Linux Foundation). * foomatic-filters is a set of printer drivers, basically. * Some time ago the cups-filters maintainers took over maintainership of the foomatic-filters part for CUPS as well, and integrated it cleanly into cups- filters. That's the reason for the blocker; recent cups-filters contain the newest foomatic code available. The former separate foomatic-filters package is now unmaintained. Thanks! That was brilliantly clear and informative. So, we have the following possibilities for installation: 1) normal CUPS user, recommended, this is what comes by default (unless you do something stupid such as USE=-*) net-print/cups net-print/cups-filters[foomatic] This is what I now have. 2) NOT recommended, dead code, unmaintained: net-print/cups net-print/cups-filters[-foomatic] net-print/foomatic-filters 3) for the stone age people out there, NOT recommended, dead code, unmaintained: any other printing system, e.g. lprng net-print/foomatic-filters I had lprng when I first installed Gentoo (2010). It just worked (with apsfilter(?s) rather than foomatic). Was forced, with regret, to switch to cups when libreoffice stopped supporting traditional print spoolers. So, what's wrong in your case? No idea, but after longish not-updating things do get hard for emerge to unravel. My recommendation is, since foomatic- filters and cups-filters are only needed for printing and emerge runs fine without them, force-remove both and let emerge figure out the right package set from scratch. This worked! I now have printing. [This basically works with any blocker as a last resort, but can be *very* dangerous for packages that are needed by the core system. You definitely don't want to remove gcc or glibc this way, for example. :)] emerge -aC net-print/cups-filters net-print/foomatic-filters emerge -uDNavt --backtrack=100 world I've not plucked up the courage for the world emerge, yet. But the original bug was that I had to get --debug output from emerge to see that it was the foomatic/cups stuff that was clashing. This wasn't contained in the normal, somewhat obscure, emerge error messages. Cheers, Andreas -- Andreas K. Huettel Gentoo Linux developer (council, kde) dilfri...@gentoo.org http://www.akhuettel.de/ -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?
Hi, Alan. On Sun, Jun 08, 2014 at 11:47:32PM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: For Alan Mackenzie's benefit, a little back story: The whole topic of printing is a mess, no single mere mortal can wrap their wits around it. Long long ago a printer was a piece of hardware you plugged into a serial or parallel port, the kernel found it and you were good to go. Whoopee! Because more than one user could use the printer and this causes conflicts, print servers were written: the server controlled the printer hardware and you submitted your print job to the server, and that took care of all the messy parts. To do it over the network was just as easy, modify the print server to also listen on a network port. This server was the classic lp suite of tools. Many years ago, HP developed a fancy printing language for their laser printers called PostScript[1]. Wasn't it Adobe? Think of it as a giant image format, it doesn't describe what the printed page looks like, it really is simple code that tells the printer how to print the page, including graphics and such. And so the era of complicated drivers was begun. These laser printers needed gobs of memory and big cpus to deal with PostScript, in the 386 era it was common to have a printer much more powerful than your computer. Enter other vendors and Windows. Just like with sound cards, vendors wrote their own drivers adding features done in software. This makes sense if you can't get PostScript to do double-sided printing or scale down so two pages fit on one page, doesn't make so much sense if you just want to avoid paying HP a PostScript license. After a while, HP got around to updating PostScript (or maybe it was Apple's code all long - I forget...) and called it PCL (Printer Control Language), needing new drivers. meanwhile, printers shifted over to USB away from parallel ports and this needed new drivers. Plus there's two way to do it: do the USB part of the printing in userspace and only use the kernel for regular USB work, or put the whole thing in the kernel. Needing more drivers. last I looked, there were still some serious issues with the options to have it all in the kernel. This is the CONFIG_USB_PRINTER, which if I remember correctly, must be either on or off depending on other things you might have configured. I have been confused about this in the past. Incidentally, my printer has a parallel port which was still in use until I got my new box in 2009. On the print server side, the devs were getting real busy. We had classic lp, then came lprng, then something else I forget and finally an upstart crowd wrote CUPS (Common Unix Printing System), eventually bought by Apple. Ironically, there's now nothing common about it and it's for iOS not Unix. Such is life. With the latest major version update Apple ripped out all the bits we find so useful and still declare the software is for Unix. I wasn't aware of that. This is a variant of MS's Embrace, extend and shows the dangers inherent in allowing commercial firms like Apple (or Redhat?) to take control of infrastructure bits of the system. I used lprng until ~2 years ago, when libreoffice stopped supporting classical print spoolers. lprng just worked, unlike all the kerfuffle with cups. Firms like Canon had developed big expensive network-enabled stand-alone printers. You'd think this is as easy as fitting an embedded OS with a print server to replace a dedicated PC with USB/parallel ports... I've had to deal with junk that despite being branded PostScript would only work with it's own Windows drivers. 50 Linux users of all sorts and different distros could not get this bitch to work. Presumably, there'll be a PostScript validation suite which probably costs much more than the printer you wanted to validate. Enter the age of network printing protocols. We have IPP running on port 631, something else that is supposedly HTML with huge amounts of extra printer-specific stuff, JetDirect, and many more things I've long ago forgotten about. Plus Samba to share a printer the way Windows does it. Yes. Lots of complication, with no benefit for users like me. :-( Did I mention PPDs? Printer something Definition files that describe how to drive a printer using a standard dscription file. Awesome. Where do you get these things? Oh I dunno there's foomatic, cups built-ins, gutenprint, magicfilter and some magic thing from HP called hplip that I once found worked for an Epson inkjet! Andreas did a fine job above of describing a map to get around this driver stuff, including all the many wonderful ways these driver ebuilds have to block each other to get installed at all. Indeed. And I haven't even touched on CUPS' feature that requires you to delete and re-add back all your printers after any remerge. Ask Dale about this, he's the resident expert and he's even figured out how to get hplip to work. I don't seem to need hplip at the
Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?
Are you still here, still listening? Ye gods, this mail is 5x longer than I thought it would be. I personally have given up on printing period. I either randomly hit useful looking buttons in KDE's config widget hoping it will work, or at work I print to PDF, put it on a USB dongle and wander over to my wife's desk saying please print this on your windows machine. I usually get printing working from Linux before I get it working on MS Windows. Then again. Some printers accept a USB stick with PDFs and can print them natively. Those aren't too expensive either. -- Joost -- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?
On 09/06/2014 12:28, Alan Mackenzie wrote: Hi, Alan. On Sun, Jun 08, 2014 at 11:47:32PM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: For Alan Mackenzie's benefit, a little back story: [...] Many years ago, HP developed a fancy printing language for their laser printers called PostScript[1]. Wasn't it Adobe? Yes, I believe you are right. this old brain isn;t what it used to be [...] meanwhile, printers shifted over to USB away from parallel ports and this needed new drivers. Plus there's two way to do it: do the USB part of the printing in userspace and only use the kernel for regular USB work, or put the whole thing in the kernel. Needing more drivers. last I looked, there were still some serious issues with the options to have it all in the kernel. This is the CONFIG_USB_PRINTER, which if I remember correctly, must be either on or off depending on other things you might have configured. I have been confused about this in the past. Incidentally, my printer has a parallel port which was still in use until I got my new box in 2009. That's the one. Very very confusing at the time and I recall it clearly - the kernel config help text was as far from helpful as one can get. Lucky for me, I found a howto by someone who understood and that sorted it for me. [...] And I haven't even touched on CUPS' feature that requires you to delete and re-add back all your printers after any remerge. Ask Dale about this, he's the resident expert and he's even figured out how to get hplip to work. I don't seem to need hplip at the moment. My emerge of cups last night (to 1.7.1) didn't need me to reinstall my printer. As I understand it hplip installs drivers for HP printers and is able to figure out what you have and which driver you need. I doubt it is a dependency of anything, it looks more like something you install if you want it and need it [...] My main problem was with emerge. The fact that various printing packages were blocking eachother was only apparent in the 147k line debug output, not in the normal messages printed to stdout/stderr. You have the bad luck to have picked exactly the wrong time to update a Gentoo box after a long time away. A *lot* has happened in the tree over the past several months, especially sub-slots that have now come into their own. Sub-slots are actually a good idea, and time will tell if the implementation is also a good idea. There's many benefits, not least of which is that every huge package your have like libreoffice probably doesn't need updating every time a line of code changes in icu. Not needing @preserved-rebuild is a small bonus, not something I care much about. And I don't mind running perl-cleaner once a year with a major version perl upgrade. I *do* mind forgetting to run perl-cleaner and being caught out - sub-slots help with that. Unfortunately portage has always been a tad obtuse with it's output, and leans heavy towards a fatal design flaw to the user - too much of the internal implementation shows up in the output wording. Recent !arch version deal with this, that no parents that aren't satisfied in this slot message is gone (no-one ever knew what that meant) and is replaced with clever output that prints version numbers and operators (, = and so on) in colour with neat carat symbols ^ below, that point to what is important. I strongly recommend you set portage to use ~arch, it is good code these days and while it doesn't remove the complexity of the tree, it does make a much better job of telling you what is going on and what it needs from you to proceed. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?
On Sun, 8 Jun 2014 15:48:09 +, Alan Mackenzie wrote: (net-print/cups-filters-1.0.53::gentoo, ebuild scheduled for merge) pulled in by net-print/cups-filters:0 required by @__auto_slot_operator_replace_installed__ =net-print/cups-filters-1.0.43-r1[foomatic] required by (net-print/foomatic-filters-ppds-20070501::gentoo, installed) =net-print/cups-filters-1.0.30 required by (net-print/cups-1.6.4::gentoo, installed) net-print/cups-filters required by (net-print/foomatic-filters-4.0.17-r1::gentoo, installed) Does the emerge output somewhere include an update to cups? If the installed and new versions have different dependencies you may see this. Remove cups-filters and foomatic-filters, update cups and then run the world update. -- Neil Bothwick Every time I jump on the bandwagon all its wheels fall off. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?
Am Sonntag, 8. Juni 2014, 17:48:09 schrieb Alan Mackenzie: . What is all this trying to tell me? I've tried for over an hour to make sense of it, but my eyes just glaze over. My best guess is that cups-filters and foomatic-filters are packages which can't be installed together. But I _need_ foomatic-filters - otherwise my printer doesn't print. Or do I? cups-filters seems to be needed by cups. What _are_ cups-filters and foomatic-filters? emerge -s is little help here. Why do I need both of them? * cups-filters is a former part of cups that provides file format conversions (among other things). Basically it (also) makes sure that everything is internally converted to PDF. It's not part of CUPS (as maintained by Apple) anymore, but hard-required by CUPS on Linux (and maintained by the Linux Foundation). * foomatic-filters is a set of printer drivers, basically. * Some time ago the cups-filters maintainers took over maintainership of the foomatic-filters part for CUPS as well, and integrated it cleanly into cups- filters. That's the reason for the blocker; recent cups-filters contain the newest foomatic code available. The former separate foomatic-filters package is now unmaintained. So, we have the following possibilities for installation: 1) normal CUPS user, recommended, this is what comes by default (unless you do something stupid such as USE=-*) net-print/cups net-print/cups-filters[foomatic] 2) NOT recommended, dead code, unmaintained: net-print/cups net-print/cups-filters[-foomatic] net-print/foomatic-filters 3) for the stone age people out there, NOT recommended, dead code, unmaintained: any other printing system, e.g. lprng net-print/foomatic-filters So, what's wrong in your case? No idea, but after longish not-updating things do get hard for emerge to unravel. My recommendation is, since foomatic- filters and cups-filters are only needed for printing and emerge runs fine without them, force-remove both and let emerge figure out the right package set from scratch. [This basically works with any blocker as a last resort, but can be *very* dangerous for packages that are needed by the core system. You definitely don't want to remove gcc or glibc this way, for example. :)] emerge -aC net-print/cups-filters net-print/foomatic-filters emerge -uDNavt --backtrack=100 world Cheers, Andreas -- Andreas K. Huettel Gentoo Linux developer (council, kde) dilfri...@gentoo.org http://www.akhuettel.de/
Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?
Hi, Neil. On Sun, Jun 08, 2014 at 05:11:20PM +0100, Neil Bothwick wrote: On Sun, 8 Jun 2014 15:48:09 +, Alan Mackenzie wrote: (net-print/cups-filters-1.0.53::gentoo, ebuild scheduled for merge) pulled in by net-print/cups-filters:0 required by @__auto_slot_operator_replace_installed__ =net-print/cups-filters-1.0.43-r1[foomatic] required by (net-print/foomatic-filters-ppds-20070501::gentoo, installed) =net-print/cups-filters-1.0.30 required by (net-print/cups-1.6.4::gentoo, installed) net-print/cups-filters required by (net-print/foomatic-filters-4.0.17-r1::gentoo, installed) Does the emerge output somewhere include an update to cups? If the installed and new versions have different dependencies you may see this. Yes, I think it did. Remove cups-filters and foomatic-filters, update cups and then run the world update. Well, the first bit of that went well indeed. Updating cups pulled in cups-filters but not foomatic-filters. Printing now seems to work without the latter. As for a world update, I'm still summoning up the courage. I might let that run overnight, after doing a backup. Thanks for the help! -- Neil Bothwick -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?
On 08/06/2014 19:15, Andreas K. Huettel wrote: Am Sonntag, 8. Juni 2014, 17:48:09 schrieb Alan Mackenzie: . What is all this trying to tell me? I've tried for over an hour to make sense of it, but my eyes just glaze over. My best guess is that cups-filters and foomatic-filters are packages which can't be installed together. But I _need_ foomatic-filters - otherwise my printer doesn't print. Or do I? cups-filters seems to be needed by cups. What _are_ cups-filters and foomatic-filters? emerge -s is little help here. Why do I need both of them? * cups-filters is a former part of cups that provides file format conversions (among other things). Basically it (also) makes sure that everything is internally converted to PDF. It's not part of CUPS (as maintained by Apple) anymore, but hard-required by CUPS on Linux (and maintained by the Linux Foundation). * foomatic-filters is a set of printer drivers, basically. * Some time ago the cups-filters maintainers took over maintainership of the foomatic-filters part for CUPS as well, and integrated it cleanly into cups- filters. That's the reason for the blocker; recent cups-filters contain the newest foomatic code available. The former separate foomatic-filters package is now unmaintained. So, we have the following possibilities for installation: 1) normal CUPS user, recommended, this is what comes by default (unless you do something stupid such as USE=-*) net-print/cups net-print/cups-filters[foomatic] 2) NOT recommended, dead code, unmaintained: net-print/cups net-print/cups-filters[-foomatic] net-print/foomatic-filters 3) for the stone age people out there, NOT recommended, dead code, unmaintained: any other printing system, e.g. lprng net-print/foomatic-filters So, what's wrong in your case? No idea, but after longish not-updating things do get hard for emerge to unravel. My recommendation is, since foomatic- filters and cups-filters are only needed for printing and emerge runs fine without them, force-remove both and let emerge figure out the right package set from scratch. [This basically works with any blocker as a last resort, but can be *very* dangerous for packages that are needed by the core system. You definitely don't want to remove gcc or glibc this way, for example. :)] emerge -aC net-print/cups-filters net-print/foomatic-filters emerge -uDNavt --backtrack=100 world Cheers, Andreas Good post! For Alan Mackenzie's benefit, a little back story: The whole topic of printing is a mess, no single mere mortal can wrap their wits around it. Long long ago a printer was a piece of hardware you plugged into a serial or parallel port, the kernel found it and you were good to go. Whoopee! Because more than one user could use the printer and this causes conflicts, print servers were written: the server controlled the printer hardware and you submitted your print job to the server, and that took care of all the messy parts. To do it over the network was just as easy, modify the print server to also listen on a network port. This server was the classic lp suite of tools. Many years ago, HP developed a fancy printing language for their laser printers called PostScript[1]. Think of it as a giant image format, it doesn't describe what the printed page looks like, it really is simple code that tells the printer how to print the page, including graphics and such. And so the era of complicated drivers was begun. These laser printers needed gobs of memory and big cpus to deal with PostScript, in the 386 era it was common to have a printer much more powerful than your computer. Enter other vendors and Windows. Just like with sound cards, vendors wrote their own drivers adding features done in software. This makes sense is you can't get PostScript to do double-sided printing or scale down so two pages fit on one page, doesn't make so much sense if you just want to avoid paying HP a PostScript license. After a while, HP got around to updating PostScript (or maybe it was Apple's code all long - I forget...) and called it PCL (Printer Control Language), needing new drivers. meanwhile, printers shifted over to USB away from parallel ports and this needed new drivers. Plus there's two way to do it: do the USB part of the printing in userspace and only use the kernel for regular USB work, or put the whole thing in the kernel. Needing more drivers. last I looked, there were still some serious issues with the options to have it all in the kernel. On the print server side, the devs were getting real busy. We had classic lp, then came lprng, then something else I forget and finally an upstart crowd wrote CUPS (Common Unix Printing System), eventually bought by Apple. Ironically, there's now nothing common about it and it's for iOS not Unix. Such is life. With the latest major version update Apple ripped out all the bits we find so useful and still declare the software is for
Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?
Alan McKinnon wrote: And I haven't even touched on CUPS' feature that requires you to delete and re-add back all your printers after any remerge. Ask Dale about this, he's the resident expert and he's even figured out how to get hplip to work. Every time I upgrade CUPS or hplip, I go to a Konsole and type in hp-setup as root. A window pops up and I just set the printer up again, it's GUI based. So far, that has worked. Don't jinx it tho. lol If needed, I go to my web browser to CUPS and delete the printer first. Since I ran out of ink, I haven't printed in a while however, the same works on my brothers puter and he runs Kubuntu. Well, was my brothers anyway. :/ Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?
On 06/08/2014 03:08 PM, Dale wrote: Every time I upgrade CUPS or hplip, I go to a Konsole and type in hp-setup as root. A window pops up and I just set the printer up again, it's GUI based. So far, that has worked. Don't jinx it tho. lol Yep, same here. I read a lot of horror stories getting it to work, and when I first installed hplip it didn't do anything until I googled and found I had to run hp-setup with elevated privileges. I haven't had any issues printing - hplip prints great with my CP1025nw. If needed, I go to my web browser to CUPS and delete the printer first. I hate updating cups and hplip, I've masked newer versions and will only update when I really have to. (Like another package needing a new version of something-or-other.) Since I ran out of ink, I haven't printed in a while however, the same works on my brothers puter and he runs Kubuntu. Well, was my brothers anyway. :/ I'm using hplip on Ubuntu, Mint, and Gentoo. Dan
Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?
On 09/06/2014 00:08, Dale wrote: Alan McKinnon wrote: And I haven't even touched on CUPS' feature that requires you to delete and re-add back all your printers after any remerge. Ask Dale about this, he's the resident expert and he's even figured out how to get hplip to work. Every time I upgrade CUPS or hplip, I go to a Konsole and type in hp-setup as root. A window pops up and I just set the printer up again, it's GUI based. So far, that has worked. Don't jinx it tho. lol printing? printing? who mentioned printing? sure wasn't me, I remember all too well what happened that time we mentioned HAL and you were around that was not good and none of us want *that* again so we are very careful in what we say to keep the jinx monster away :-) You've been quite lately though, what happened? Surely it can't be that Gentoo finally stopped messing with you and started behaving itself? hahahaha Alan made a funny -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
