Re: [Lug-Nuts] newbie printing stuff

From: Brian Lavender (brian@brie.com)
Date: Sun Feb 06 2000 - 22:02:12 PST


Short answer:

Make sure you have LPRng (RPM or deb or Slackware tgz) installed and get
apsfilter:

ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/linux/sunsite/system/printing/apsfilter-4.9.9.tar.gz

Long answer:

Printing on Linux is complex. If you have the time, spending a
weekend with the printing HOWTO can be well justified.

http://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/Printing-HOWTO

The old style of printing used to be LPR. The newer "standard" tends
to be LPRng which was developed at San Diego State and I believe now
is maintained by some guys at

http://www.astart.com/lprng/LPRng.html

If you know what you are doing, you can print across the net using
encrypted communication. You also want a good printcap. By default,
printing on unix will stairstep if you print a text file. If you have a
postscript printer, and you send postscript to it, it will print it. But
not all of us have postscript printers. I have an HP LaserJet 4L which
uses HP's PCL language. Fortunately, if you have an HP Laser priter, you
are going to find good support for Linux. To make the documents come out
right, you want a filter. The filter can in some cases determine if you
are trying to print postscript, an image file, or a text file. It will
then apply the appropriate filter and send the output to the printer
in a language that you can understand. For example:

$ lpr image.gif

will automatically print a gif image with the appropriate /etc/printcap
and filters.

If you go to a sunsite mirror, you will find a number of available
filters. The aps filter is a good one to start with. It recognizes all
sorts of printers, and it will work with ghostscript which will emulate
postscript.

Here is my favorite sunsite mirror for printcap filters.

ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/linux/sunsite/system/printing/

brian

On Sun, Feb 06, 2000 at 07:22:54PM -0800, Beth Camero wrote:
> Could somebody point me in the right direction for printer configuration?
> I put a linux box on my home network (such as it is) and my printer is hooked
> to my main windows machine. My kid prints to my printer, no problem, using the
> share name, from his windows machine. How do I set something up like that in
> KDE? I got Samba working, and we can all ping each other. I couldn't find a
> man page for it and KDE help was less than helpful. I figure I must have to
> set up a printer share in smb.conf that points to my windows machine, but so
> far that doesn't appear to work, or I have the syntax wrong for the share name
> or something. What should it look like? And then, how do you tie the printer
> icon on the KDE desktop to that?
> TIA
> Beth Camero
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-- 
Brian Lavender
http://www.brie.com/brian/
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