[rescue] Non postscript printers

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

Dan Williams wrote:
> 
> I unfortunatly have a windows only usb printer. After a lot of grief I 
> have managed to get it running under cups with linux, I don't really 
> want to have go through it again for other machines. Does anyone know of 
> a cheap(ie. free) program for windows which can take a network 
> postscript print and convert to a windows printer driver, I have found a 
> few commercial programs which are way out of my price league. Apparantly 
> nt server can do this but it is very slow and unreliable, can anyone 
> comment on this ?

I had a similar problem. I have an HP LJII on a system running Red Hat
7.2 (with lprng), a system running RH9 (on another floor) with a Xante
Accelewriter (A Postscript level 1 printer) and an Epson inkjet and a
windows machine with an HP P1000 inkjet. 

What I ended up doing was using CUPS as included with the RH9 system
as the main print server. However I found that it worked much better to
add foomatic-gswrapper, foomatic-rip, and ppds  from linuxprinting.org.

I also found that using cups to configre the pritners via it's
web interface worked far better than redhat-config-printer.

I enclose my printers.conf file. Note that cups rips level 2 or 3 postscript
and converts it to level 1 for the Xante printer.

Note that the printers on the print server are shared with both
samba and netatalk. 

What's not obvious is that the ppds for the inkjet printers are different
for each version. One specifies the highest possible resolution the printer
supports, the best quality ink dispersal and photo paper. The text
versions specify 300 dpi, black only, draft resoultion.

The printserver is a Pentium 166 with 32meg of ram, 2x3.5gig hard drives.
Not a very big, fast or expensive machine.

And for those tha care:

 21:05:48  up 31 days,  1:12,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson gsm at mendelson.com 972-54-608-069
Do sysadmins count networked sheep?

# Printer configuration file for CUPS v1.1.17
# Written by cupsd on Fri 20 Jun 2003 05:18:22 AM GMT
<Printer epson>
Info epson c20ux
Location downstairs
DeviceURI usb:/dev/usb/lp0
State Idle
Accepting Yes
JobSheets none none
QuotaPeriod 0
PageLimit 0
KLimit 0
</Printer>
<Printer epson-text>
Info same as epson for text only
Location downstairs
DeviceURI usb:/dev/usb/lp0
State Idle
Accepting Yes
JobSheets none none
QuotaPeriod 0
PageLimit 0
KLimit 0
</Printer>
<Printer hp>
Info Created by redhat-config-printer 0.6.x
DeviceURI lpd://cable/hp
State Idle
Accepting Yes
JobSheets none none
QuotaPeriod 0
PageLimit 0
KLimit 0
</Printer>
<Printer margie>
Info Created by redhat-config-printer 0.6.x
DeviceURI smb://@mendelson/margie/hp
State Idle
Accepting Yes
JobSheets none none
QuotaPeriod 0
PageLimit 0
KLimit 0
</Printer>
<Printer text>
Info Created by redhat-config-printer 0.6.x
DeviceURI smb://@mendelson/margie/hp
State Idle
Accepting Yes
JobSheets none none
QuotaPeriod 0
PageLimit 0
KLimit 0
</Printer>
<DefaultPrinter xl>
Info asante accelewriter
Location downstairs
DeviceURI parallel:/dev/lp0
State Idle
Accepting Yes
JobSheets none none
QuotaPeriod 0
PageLimit 0
KLimit 0
</Printer>
<Printer xl-pcl>
Info same as xl, but translates ps to pcl
Location downstairs
DeviceURI parallel:/dev/lp0
State Idle
Accepting Yes
JobSheets none none
QuotaPeriod 0
PageLimit 0
KLimit 0
</Printer>