Re: faxing using linux?
Chris Keathley Keathley <ckeathley@yahoo.com> writes:
> I am new to linux and learning a lot very fast. I am doing good
> learning on my own and reading many linux and unix books. But , my
> wife needs to fax something and I don't have any clue on how to go
> about it. I think I am supposed to use mgetty but I don't understand
> it. I read the man pages and it said something about mgetty.info, but
> I couldn't find that file. Could someone step me through it and please
> keep in mind I am new. It is very easy to talk over my head.
Ok - you can use mgetty, but I've found it easier to use efax (also a
debian package) - also, efax supports older fax modems (class 1) than
mgetty does (mgetty requires class 2 or higher).
Also, what your wife needs to fax needs to be in either postscript,
plain text, or an image file. Most programs that are able to print
documents can produce postscript output.
If you're going to fax postscript files, you also need the 'gs' and
'gs-fonts' packages. (I think that the 'gs-aladin' package instead of
'gs' will also work, but I don't use it)
Here's what I did:
I installed efax, and then edited the /etc/efax.rc file and replaced
the obvious things that needed replacing (there are bits that say
things like "---Your name here---" - it's pretty obvious what needs to
be replaced). Since my modem is an old class 1 fax modem, I had to
add a line to /etc/efax.rc file saying:
CLASS=1
You can test whether your modem is a class 1 or class 2 (or even class
2.0) fax modem by doing the following in minicom:
AT+FCLASS=0
AT+FCLASS=1
AT+FCLASS=2
AT+FCLASS=2.0
Some of these commands will return OK, some will return ERROR - the
last command that says "OK" indicates the class of your modem. On my
machine, AT+FCLASS=0 and AT+FCLASS=1 both return OK, but the other
commands return ERROR. You only need to add a 'CLASS=' line to
/etc/efax.rc if you have a class 1 modem.
Once you've done this, and set up your /etc/efax.rc appropriately, you
can fax things with:
fax send 555-1212 file.ps
(of course, you would presumably use a different phone number and
filename)
More details on other fax commands (receiving, etc.) can be found in
the 'fax' manpage.
One word of caution - faxing postscript creates a load of temporary
files in the current directory, one for each page - file.ps.001,
file.ps.002, etc. so you'll have to remove them with something like
rm file.ps.[0-9][0-9][0-9]
after you've faxed something.
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