Preliminary comment: David, please stop telling people to "RTFM". This
response is neither helpful nor courteous, and I for one find the implied
vulgarity offensive. This list is more courteous in tone, or should be.
As to John's question ... it depends on that you mean by "setting it up in
Linux". To get straight ascii text out of it, all you should need to do is:
plug it into the appropriate port (you don't say if it is
a serial or parallel device).
add an entry in /etc/printcap that names and points to the printer
{"man lpd" and "man printcap" should give you
the needed details; usually, printcap has a model
entry for straight-text printers indluded).
test it with (your /dev/*0 may vary):
cat /etc/printcap >/dev/lp0
test it through lpr (this assumes you have lpd running; you may
need to stop and restart lpd after you edit printcap) with:
lpr -Pprintername /etc/printcap
In the above tests, you can, of course, substitute any ascii file. The first
test doesn't rely on the printcap entry, only on the /dev/* entry being
correct and configured correctly (the latter may be an issue with a serial
port, but it won't be with a working parallel port). The second test does
check the correctness of the printcap entry.
If you want to get graphics out of the printer, including output from
programs that expect to send text out in Postscript format, you'll need to
see if there is a Ghostscript filter for the printer. This is, as you'd
imagine, printer specific. To find out, start at URL
http://www.picante.com/~gtaylor/pht/printer_list.cgi
Since I don't use RH or any of its derivatives, I can't comment on the
printtool suggestion David made - it may do some of this work for you.
At 12:47 PM 9/4/99 -0700, David Rysdam wrote:
>Three ways:
>
>1) RTFM
>2) RedHat-based systems (which Mandrake is) have several simple tools
>installed for this kind of thing. In this case "printtool" is what you
>want.
>3) For a simple dot-matrix, all you really need to do is plug it in and
>make sure you have lpr installed and lpd running. RTFM for this.
>
>John Aldrich wrote:
>>
>> I've got an existing Mandrake 6.0 system I'd like to add a printer
>> to. It's a plain dot-matrix 24-pin printer. How do I go about setting
>> it up in Linux?
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA 94303-3603 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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