RE: Setting up a printer in sarge...
Hi Sven,
I have a debian Sarge server at home, witch i user for internet routing. Because i have a small network, i decided to use it as a printer server as wel voor my Mh DeskJet 3320 with usb connector (i guess it is a 3320, im in the office now). After some reading i did:
Install hpijs
Install cups
Told Samba to use cups for printing
IN total, it cost me about 6 hours before i had the configuration of samba and cups right, but eventually, it all worked.
I would recommend:
do a apt-get install hpijs cups
Use the cups webinterface to see if you can access the printer. WHen this all works, use some other programm to do the rest (samba in my case).
Hope this helps....
Regards, Jasper
-----Original Message-----
From: Sven Marnach [mailto:sven@pantoffel-wg.de]
Sent: vrijdag 20 augustus 2004 0:33
To: debian-testing@lists.debian.org
Subject: Setting up a printer in sarge...
Hi,
having spent several hours in trying to get a quite common printer
working in sarge, I would like to report about the problems to make
you aware of them. I didn't know much about printing in Debian
before, but I hoped it couldn't be too hard to make an HP DeskJet 670C
printer working. I was wrong.
In woody everything was very easy. I just installed lprng and
magicfilter, called magicfilterconfig, selected the filter
dj670c-filter for the HP DeskJet 670C, and everything worked fine.
In sarge I tried to do the same, but it didn't work. When I tried to
print a page using "lpr foo.ps" I just got the message "cdj670: no
such device" printed on the sheet. I tried to find any log files
which give more information, but the log files /var/log/lp* all were
empty or didn't contain any relevant information. This problem rose
up again and again: when something went wrong, I didn't get any error
messages or diagnostic output. It just didn't work.
In this case I had the message "cdj670: no such device" after all, and
I figured out that ghostscript printed this message because for some
reason the driver cdj670 isn't compiled in any more.
So I looked for different packages which could enable me using the
printer. I first tried to use CUPS, but CUPS printed everything
negatively, black replaced with white and vice versa. It cost me a
lot of ink, but I didn't get it working.
Next I did some internet inquest to find out what to do. On
linuxprinting.org the hpijs drivers are recommended for my printer, so
I installed them. I hoped the package documentation would help me
getting these drivers working in combination with a printing spooler,
but it didn't.
By browsing the Debian archive I found apsfilter, and I tried to
install it. apsfilterconfig offered to use the hpijs driver, and I
thought to have achieved my aim. But "lpr foo.ps" didn't do anything.
It not even printed an error message. lpq showed the job with state
"active" for a while, then the state turned to "error". I didn't find
any hints in the logfiles what was going wrong. Calling apsfilter by
hand, I learned it was complaining that the program psset was
missing. So I installed a2ps, which isn't in the dependencies of
apsfilter. (It is in the recommendation, but in and or'ed list
together with enscript. I had enscript installed and thus considered
the recommendations satisfied.)
And finally I managed to print a page. But I soon noticed that it was
only possible to print very, very few PS-files. Most PS-files - like
those created by LaTeX - couldn't be printed, even if ghostscript was
able to process them.
So my quest for a working printer configuration continued. I read a
little more documentation on linuxprinting.org and installed a bunch
of foomatic-packages. My first attempt was using the foomatic-gui
wizard to configure foomatic, but after answering all the Questions in
the wizard, nothing happened. I neither got a working configuration,
nor an error message. So I read the man page of foomatic-configure
and with a little guessing a put the following comand line together:
foomatic-configure -n lp -N "HP DeskJet 670C" -L "local" \
-c file:/dev/lp0 -s lprng -p "HP-DeskJet_670C" -d hpijs
This resulted in the error message
Use of uninitialized value in substitution (s///) at /usr/share/perl5/Foomatic/DB.pm line 3426.
(At least I got an error message!) And it produced an incomplete
configuration. Querying the current configuration with
"foomatic-configure -Q", I got the following ouput:
Use of uninitialized value in subroutine entry at /usr/bin/foomatic-configure line 200.
Can't use string ("") as a subroutine ref while "strict refs" in use at /usr/bin/foomatic-configure line 200.
At this point, I gave up and started writing this mail. (In fact, in
the above description I skipped most of the steps I really did.)
In my opinion, this story illustrates one of the main problems of
Debian: if you want to install packages for a given task, you find
tens of packages that could be suitable, but you don't find any hints
to compare them. You have to test them one by one and then you can
decide. Maybe in common, there is no solution for this problem, but
in the special case of printer configuration there should be a
recommended procedure how to do that. (And of course, the lots of
bugs I encountered shouldn't be there...)
And, certainly, I would be glad if someone could give me a hint how to
get that damn printer working...
Cheers,
Sven
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