Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS wrote:
Firstly, is there a recommended way of doing printing with Debian? I see various mentions of LPD, LPRng, CUPS, PDQ and printtool, and there are a large number of printer-related packages in the archive, many of which conflict with one another, but I can't find a document to help me decide what to install. I tried printtool, but it says it can't find my parallel port. Well, the printer does react when I do "modprobe parport_pc" or "echo foo > /dev/lp0", so there is some kind of physical connection. My printer's a Canon BJC-4300 and it has worked with Debian before, but it was years ago and I can't remember how I did it. Chances are everything will have changed by now, anyway. Yes, I did look at The Printing HOWTO, but it doesn't say very much about parallel ports and I can't have much confidence in a document that talks about "kernels >= 2.1.33" when I'm running 2.4.8.
I used lprng for years, but switched to cups about 6 months ago. I much prefer it, but I'm sure others might disagree. If you decide to go with cups, I have some instructions that might be useful. They are here:
http://mumford1.dyndns.org/~bs7452/linuxhelp/cups.htmlKeep in mind that I wrote this for a friend, so it is by no means a complete HOWTO or anything. It is also no substitute for the CUPS documentation which is very complete. However, my instructions are specific to debian, and IMHO easier to follow. You can ignore the stuff about samba since you will be using the parallel port (which is what I use at work). My friend and I both run sid, so it's possible things may be slightly different for stable or testing.
Good luck! -- Brian J. Stults Department of Sociology University of Florida Box 117330 Gainesville, Florida 32611-7330 phone: (352) 392-0265 x286 fax: (352) 392-6568 e-mail: bstults@soc.ufl.edu