After happily using a basic lp script derived from the
printing-from-scratch hint (thanks again, Declan and Uli), I see that
gutenprint will *really* want me to use cups (lots of altered switches
for ijsgutenprint, not really documented), so I'm yet again being
dragged kicking and screaming into using slightly newer methods ;)
At the moment, I'm playing on a clfs box, mainly because its desktop is
quite sparse so I can get a better feel for exactly what I need. The
really good news is that building with the blfs-svn instructions and
versions (plus ijs) gave me a working printer, which is a huge advance
on my previous attempts with cups. [ NB I'm putting this in /usr/local
for testing, and there was a permissions problem that turned out to be
the var/spool directory itself (root:root, needed to be root:lp), plus
there were perhaps incorrect ownership and permissions on
var/spool/cups{,/tmp} which I only managed to fix by recreating them -
somebody on debian reported a similar gotcha in the past. Hopefully, a
straight lfs/blfs build into /usr might not have these problems. ]
So, now for the questions: I've got exactly one physical printer (an
epson stylus), and in cups I have to configure output mode, resolution,
media size, media type, and I can play with colour settings for the
gimp-print driver, and banners. For my typical printing, I can see that
I'll want settings for draft (for speed), quality, and probably a couple
of photo variants (high quality paper, and glossy paper). In cups
terms, does it make sense to use a different "printer" for each of
these, all pointing to the same physical printer, or is there a better
way ? And can I do anything to enforce a maximum of one of these
"printers" actually running at a time (i.e. all could be queueing jobs,
but it would be unfortunate if text and photos were printed onto the
same media).
My printer is one of those which needs to be initialised before it will
do anything useful from linux (escputil -u -s -r /dev/usb/lp0) - with
udev, I suppose I can create a symlink to e.g. /dev/epson830u and use
that as the device in cups, but can I also trigger this escputil command
to run when the printer device appears, and if so, what's the simplest
way to do that ?
Ken
--
das eine Mal als Trag?die, das andere Mal als Farce
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