[SLUG] printer + Cups

[Al Girling]

On Tue, Sep 16, 2003 at 11:37:48PM +0100, Jamie Adams wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-09-16 at 22:18, Al Girling wrote:
> 
> > 
> > If anyone is interested to know how I did this, let me know and I'll post the
> > saga.
> > 
> 
> Please share. :)
> 
> It looked quite problematic at the meet.

O.K.

Due to not taking any notes the evening of the meeting, it's been quite hard
to piece together some of the things done to get the printer working.  I'll
have a stab anyway.

Firstly, to set the scene.

Printer: HP Deskjet 959c
OS: Debian GNU/Linux
Connected by: Parrallel port

Here's a list of the software installed, some of this may not be necessary to
get the printer working.  But as I planned to use 'Gimp' I went for those
packages too.  Similarly, ghostscript might have been avoided.  Had I installed
the appropriate driver for the printer.

cupsys
cupsys-client
cupsys-driver-gimpprint
libgimpprint1
ghostscript

I checked http://www.linuxprinting.org/printer_list.cgi to determine if the
printer was in fact supported.  This also gave me the details of the required
driver 'hpijs'.

Next I needed a .PPD file.  This came from
http://www.linuxprinting.org/download/PPD//HP-DeskJet_959C-hpijs.ppd this was
copied to /usr/share/cups/model/

Next i had to ensure the driver 'hpijs' was installed.  This was done through
'ghostscript' with;

# gs -h

The next stage is a bit hazy, as I ended up by going through all this lot
several times because I had difficulty getting the cups webmin page to work.
The documentation said to restart the cupsd by using one of;

# killall -HUP cupsd
# /etc/init.d/cups restart
# /etc/software/init.d/cups restart

I ended up trying them all, but to be honest. I couldn't tell you which one
worked.  Sorry!

Next was to install the 'foomatic' scripts.

# cd /usr/bin
# wget http://www.linuxprinting.org/foomatic-rip
# wget http://www.linuxprinting.org/foomatic-gswrapper
# chmod 755 foomatic-rip foomatic-gswrapper
# ln -s /usr/bin/foomatic-rip /usr/lib/cups/filter/foomatic-rip

All pretty straight forward.

Next, configure cups with the webmin tool.  In your favoured browser
http://localhost:631

and add a printer.  I simply walked through the add printer wizard.  Tried the
test page, which worked.  So I tried things like 'gimp', abiword and printing
from files and Latex.dvi files etc.  It all worked well, after I realised I
needed to use lp not lpr for command line printing.

So there you have it!  I'm not going to make any claims that following this
will get your printer working.  But it may give you some pointers.

Best of luck to all who follow, and if I can help, let me know.

Toodle pip,

Al
-- 
Al Girling			Registered Linux User: 290080
				http://counter.li.org