On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 10:47 PM, Ian Collins <ian at ianshome.com> wrote:
> > Fully featured printer drivers and supplied by the printer vendor, so > unless they choose to target other platforms, you are unlikely to match > windows printing. > > That (and my scanner) is why I keep an old win2k P3 box alive! > > Unfortunately I have to disagree. Having battled with Open Solaris printing I will tell you that, much as I love Solaris in all of its forms, printing is not attractive. 1. It is fine as a print server. More than fine. But for that the print job processing happens elsewhere. 2. When you have the PPD file (Portable Printer Description file) for your printer installed, then it will print correctly, but: 3. You will be limited in terms of selectable printer options. Different applications implements the interfacing with the Gnome printing differently. This may be to divorce the application from Gnome dependencies, or whatever other rationale, but it sucks. Notably selection of Input Trays and toner saving options are missing. 4. In terms of managing printing itself, you have at least four places to look for what you want to configure, including: ospm-pm (The print manager), Solaris lpd print manager, CUPS, Command-line tools (lpadmin, cancel, accept, lpstat and friends), and The "Printers Preferences" tool (ospm-preferences). 5. You will have some interesting times figuring out which services to turn on/off when printing fails. These are not named in a way that makes them distinguish. When all else fails, start by searching for anything with either "print" or "cups" in the SMF manifest name and enable all of them. 6. Note that instaling a printer driver (PPD) file, requires you to somehow discover the existence of the "ppdmgr" command line utility. Essentially the printing experience is not great, but it works. If you are looking for a no-problems experience and considder printing a primary function of your PC, then I think Solaris will disappoint you. -- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C. Clarke My blog: http://initialprogramload.blogspot.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/opensolaris-help/attachments/20081215/53317da7/attachment.html>
