OFB Community Mailing Lists

[Eduardo Sánchez]

On Tuesday 03 March 2009 13.02.46 Jon Glass wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 4:56 PM, Jim Isbell, W5JAI >
> Now, to the printer.... I wouldn't retain much hope. Actually, there
> are drivers out there that you can find with much searching, but some
> require compiling, and all have to somehow find their way to  the
> CUPS system. So far, every time I sat down to get my Canon iP3000
> configured, I ended up giving up. I don't need printing from our
> Puppy computer, so it never became a priority for me. However, it
> _should_ be theoretically possible.

For a good printing system on GNU/Linux, you should have GPL 
Ghostscript. This is absolutely mandatory. Then you should have a good 
printing queue manager:

1) The standard choice right now is Apple's CUPS. It's a very good one, 
but I don't know how its setup is, and it might be kind of clunky and 
too large for small systems.

2) The other alternative is LPRng, which was the favoured option years 
ago. It might not be as cutting-edge as CUPS, but it gets the job done 
and it does that very well. You can couple that with APSFilter 
(www.apsfilter.org), which has an excellent, wizard-like configuration 
system very similar to that of CUPS and KDE's 3.x KPrinter, so it could 
be very user-friendly as well.

(In fact, I suspect that KPRinter's excellent interface was a GUI-
adaptation of what APSFilter offered).

There was a time, during the Slackware 9.x timeframe, where Patrick 
Volkerding didn't include CUPS yet, so I used LPRng/APSFilter very well, 
with no troubles, so I know it could work for you, too.

Therefore, in order to be able to print in GNU/Linux you need this:
GPL Ghostscript.

And also you might need Gutenprint (formerly known as GIMP-Print).

And, you will need either of those:

CUPS

or 

LPRng + APSFilter.

Blessings,

Eduardo

-- 
Eduardo Sanchez, B. Th.
Traductor Público Inglés-Español
http://shadow.sombragris.org
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