Thanks for the reply Derrick. Next time please try to be a little
quicker though would ya? :) I ended up spending a few hours figuring
everything out.
Derrick 'dman' Hudson [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 01:55:16PM -0700, Gary Hennigan wrote:
| I'm in the process of setting up a Linux server for my Home LAN and
| have some questions regarding the setup. First question is in regards
| to CUPS. I see that under cupsomatic-ppd it says that you should try
| foomatic-bin and foomatic-db first.
Just install cupsomatic-ppd and select the driver for your printer.
(it's not really a driver; rather it is a config file that tells cups
what your printer can and can't do and how to talk to the printer)
This works, but a lot of the cupsomatic-ppd drivers for my printer (HP
932C) have unmet dependencies in Debian, or just flat out don't
work. The one's I can remember were the stp driver and the hpdj
driver. The hpdj driver tries to call ghostscript with a hpdj device,
which isn't in ghostscript and was probably superseded by the hp ijs
driver. There are lots of hpdj drivers built in to ghostscript,
but the PPD file was trying to invoke gs with one that didn't exist. I
don't remember the details on the stp driver, but it had similar
problems.
| The next question relates to using this printer via Samba from a
| Windoze client. I understand the Windoze client needs the native
| Windoze driver for my printer installed,
Yes and no. The Windows architecture requires the clients to do all
conversion to printer-native data streams. The secret here is that
you can set up a generic postscript driver on the windows machine and
your cups configuration will handle the translation to printer-native
just as it does for all of your unix applications. I use this for a
Canon BJC-610 which doesn't have any good windows drivers (except for
the one that came with it which doesn't support networking).
That would work, except I typically print photos from my Windoze box
and you typically lose something going through the CUPS driver if you
do this, since it doesn't have some of the enhancements that the
Windoze drivers have for printing photos on inkjets.
[snip]
| Will I lose that capability by attaching the printer to the Linux
| box, or does it basically send raw printer command over the Samba
| link and effectively bypass the Linux driver, which may not have all
| the capability of the Windoze driver?
If you set up the print spool in cups as type raw then you can use
the windows driver to generate the printer-native data stream. In
raw mode cups will merely queue and then deliver the data to the
printer.
(See section below on how I FINALLY got this to work)
You can configure the printer with 2 (or more) queues directed to it.
One use for that is to have one configuration with the cupsomatic
driver for your *nix apps to use and one configured as raw for the
windows clients to use.
I was aware of this. I do it all the time with my PS printer at
work. One queue for single-sided, one for double, etc.
Here's my summary for those that are in a similiar situation:
Linux side drivers:
1) HP now has a sourceforge project for drivers for a lot of their
printers, including the ink jets, which is what I have. Just go
to http://hpinkjet.sourceforge.net/ if you want to read up on the
ink jet drivers.
2) Install the hpijs Debian package. I think this might recommend or
require the gs-esp package. Just pull in any other packages it
recommends.
3) Go to
http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_driver.cgi?driver=hpijs. Near
the bottom you'll see the PPD-O-Matic. Select your printer, for
example, HP DeskJet 932C and hit the Generate PPD file
button. Save the result to your system as a text file in the
directory /usr/share/cups/model. At the top of the file will be a
line that tells you what to name the file. In my case that was
HP-DeskJet_932C-hpijs.ppd. I don't believe the name is critical,
as long as you give it the .ppd extension, but use the
recommended name if possible. Also note the field *ModelName:
in the PPD file. You'll use that in #5.
4) Restart cups with
/etc/init.d/cupsys restart
5) Now go through the CUPS interface to Add the printer. Make the
obvious choices and when you come to Model select the field as
it was shown in the PPD file under *ModelName:. For me it was
HP DeskJet 932C, Foomatic + hpijs
6) Through the CUPS interface Configure the printer with the
options of your choice.
7) The only problem I have with my printer using the above is that
the margins are off. I need to tweak the *ImageableArea
Letter/Letter field in my PPD file to fix this.
Raw printing with CUPS via Samba from a Windoze box:
This took me too long to figure out! It should be easy, you just
configure everything on the Linux box as Raw via CUPS and install
