Printers

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Someone asked:
> > > I'm new at kernels and new at configuring printers, which is probably not a 
> > > good combination in this situation.

On Mon, 3 May 1999, Glenn Burkhardt wrote:
> > Boy, is this annoying to hear.  Setting up a printer should be trivial by 
> > now.  But Sun has made the same mistake - they paid virtually no attention
> > to setting up printers, and it's a headache.

Yeah, I have the same gripe about Unix printing.  Fortunately, if
you've already got a BSD-style network printer, it's a lot easier.  As
coincidence would have it, a few hours before I read the above I had to
configure a Slackware box I'd set up last Friday to talk to the network
printer at work.  I looked at the HOWTO on the subject (boy, what a lame
document), but it was good enough.  The following is the /etc/printcap
entry I wound up creating:

# HP 5
lp|hp5:\
        :lp=/dev/null:sh:\
        :rm=brixton:\
        :sd=/var/spool/lpd/hp5:\
        :rp=hp5:\
        :mx#0:

That says send the file to the hp5 queue on host brixton.  If you have a
JetDirect port (Ethernet from HP), you can specify the 'raw' queue on whatever
hostname you've assigned to the printer in DNS or /etc/hosts (e.g.
rm=myprinter.mydomain.com:rp=raw).

This worked for me because we have PostScript printers with Ethernet
interfaces.  Alas, it's more complicated setting up the filter to run
output through Ghostscript first, and the HOWTO document doesn't
really tell you enough.  And alas, printers still seem to be sold with
PCL and parallel ports--ya still have to add beaucoup bucks to get PostScript
and Ethernet.  Maybe that'll all change in the next couple of years, when
USB becomes the norm for hooking up printers.  (But I assume USB is still
a local non-addressable protocol.  Ugh.  Never looked at it yet, though.
Ethernet makes a whole lot more sense to me--it's cheap, pretty doggone
fast, and addressable across however many boxes you want to install.)

-rich
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