Re: Printer help please!
On Sun, 8 Jul 2001, Andrea Vettorello wrote:
> bernard wrote:
>
> > For the last three days I have been banging my head against the wall
> > ("don't worry dear, its as pointy as ever it was" says my sympathetic
> > girlfriend) trying to get my printer to work. I installed potato some
> > time ago and tried to install cups, but didn't have much luck, so
> > I stripped everything off and re-installed lprng. I then used apsfilter
> > to configure things, the apsfilter printed a perfect test page but
> > when I used lpr....nothing! I tried with printtool which printed a
> > test ascii direct to the port but under lpr the printer muttered a
> > bit and then stopped.
> Not an expert here, but i'm using pdq/xpd (tracking unstable =) with a
> stylus color 880 and works quite well with the ghostscript stp driver.
Another option is to compile a deb from a more recent version of cups
sources in testing/unstable. I don't think cups has much by way of
dependencies, so this should be straightforward. I use cups on my old SuSE
system and really like it. If your printer is a recent postscript printer
then cups is the way to go because it can read ppd files, and then your
printer will have all the functionality it has under Windows, which is
nice. And cups has a really nice front-end called qtcups.
However, even if your printer is not postscript, you can still get it to
work. There are some nice articles about cups out there, some available off
www.linuxprinting.org. I seem to remember mandrakeuser had an article. Try
going to google and doing a search for cups printing.
When I got my current HP 2100M back around Christmas, I spent several days
going through all the available printing software (there is a nice listing
with links of linuxprinting.org). Fortunately, I had the time, since I was
on vacation. I first tried plain lpr with apsfilter, then I tried lprng,
then pdq, and finally tried cups, which I liked so much I threw everything
else out and stuck with it. And I made my own rpm for SuSE from the source
rpm on the cups web site, since the cups source rpm was a bit of a mess,
and seemed by default more designed for Redhat type systems. But you've
got Debian (three cheers for Debian) so you won't have those problems.
I use potato and this is what I am going to do for my new Debian system.
Hope this helps.
Faheem.
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