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[Wayan Vota]

Tony Pearson of IBM Inside System Storage has a somewhat complicated HowTo for printing from the XO laptop: 

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/InsideSystemStorage?entry=printing_on_xo_laptop_with

Is this the easiest way to connect an XO to a printer?  And if not, can you give us a HowTo with less steps?

[AuntiMame]

w00t! this is the one feature that I feared would not arrive..

thanks for posting the link. The instructions are very well written and documented.

 

Aunti

[xomaha]

Cups and printing in Linux is a pain.

I was able to get the Fedora 7 system configuration setup installed with some driver support as root using

    yum install system-config-printer rhpl ghostscript cups-lpd

then start cups

    /etc/init.d/cups start

then run setup

    system-config-printer

But the overhead is quit heavy (way over 100 Mb). Good setup tool, good driver support, still my goal would be to print to a Windows shared printer, and for that you need Samba. That will add to the weight.

I think Tony's tutorial is great for low-overhead print support. To get the kind of easy support as in Fedora Core or Ubuntu with lots of setup options, drivers and connectivity options, it's going to be too heavy.

XO fan in Omaha

[xomaha]

Ok, here's an update: Easy print configuration, if you want to burn up the disk space --

My goal: Set up a print queue to a Windows shared printer (HP Deskjet 5550) on my home network.

Disk overhead: 170 Mb (*cough*)

Steps:

1. Open terminal
2. su - root
3. yum install system-config-printer rhpl cups ghostscript samba-client hpijs
4. /etc/init.d/cups start
5. system-config-printer
6. New Printer (printer name: print) (Description:HP5550)
7. Windows Printer via SAMBA (smb://192.168.1.103/hp) (added my appropriate windows PC credentials)
8. Driver (HP from database, 5550 from the sublist)

Works like a charm. Looks, feels and tastes like the Redhat printer setup, if you've ever used Redhat. Don't try this unless you're prepared to eat up 170 Mb of space.  I suggest you test things in a XO emulator before you honk up your child's machine


XO fan in Omaha

[wirzcat]

There are a lot of drivers in those files and thus the 170MB.

If you just install cups and find the correct driver for your printer, it will be about 3MB.  I installed cups and can do raw prints, but need to look around for the driver rpm.

Also, there is a cups component called cupsaddsmb that performs the Cups-to-Samba link as opposed to adding the entire samba client.

Ok, here's an update: Easy print configuration, if you want to burn up the disk space --

My goal: Set up a print queue to a Windows shared printer (HP Deskjet 5550) on my home network.

Disk overhead: 170 Mb (*cough*)

Steps:

1. Open terminal
2. su - root
3. yum install system-config-printer rhpl cups ghostscript samba-client hpijs
4. /etc/init.d/cups start
5. system-config-printer
6. New Printer (printer name: print) (Description:HP5550)
7. Windows Printer via SAMBA (smb://192.168.1.103/hp) (added my appropriate windows PC credentials)
8. Driver (HP from database, 5550 from the sublist)

Works like a charm. Looks, feels and tastes like the Redhat printer setup, if you've ever used Redhat. Don't try this unless you're prepared to eat up 170 Mb of space.  I suggest you test things in a XO emulator before you honk up your child's machine


XO fan in Omaha

[Grampa]

For what it's worth, I've gotten pretty good results with Pearson's approach and the HPLIP driver, which covers hundreds of HP printers and multifunction devices. The driver had to be installed manually, and then supplemented with some missing dependencies (e.g., foomatic-rip), but it offers a GUI for controling the printer (hp-toolbox) and printing files (hp-print) as well as being recognized within the Opera browser. It can also be slimmed down in various ways -- e.g., eliminating the files for the hundreds of printers I don't have. If you don't need to control the fax and scanning functions, it can be slimmed down even further.

Some things, e.g., pdf files, print beautifully using hp-print. I still haven't figured out the right way to print web pages from Opera.-- the fonts are all wrong. If anyone has gotten printing within Opera to work properly, I'd be interested in learning how.

[Nick Tindall]

Arrgggh!  After following Tony Pearson's procedure pretty carefully, several times in fact, the resulting setup does everything except actually print. Any assistance warmly welcomed! 

So, a few details:
The printer is a Brother MFC-420CN, described in the Linux OpenPrinting database as "works Perfectly." Installation, CUPS configuration, printer recognition on the network and USB, and print setup in CUPS all appear to go without any errors or problems. But when it comes time to print a test page, the only sign of life at the printer itself is that the message "Receiving Data" appears for about 1/2 a second on the printer's LCD display. Meanwhile, back at the CUPS admin screen, the print jobs disappear from the queue exactly as if everything had succeeded. This behavior is the same for both the network connection and direct connection via USB, and it's a similar story for LPR. Help!

I also have a (working!) IBM 4019, also described as "works Perfectly," but I haven't had the energy to wade through all the different possibilities listed in the OpenPrinting database:

Recommended driver: laserjet (Home page, view PPD, download PPD)
Generic instructions for: CUPS, LPD, LPRng, PPR, PDQ, no spooler

At least the IBM 4019 has a trace whereby the printer will print in hexadecimal everything that's sent to it, so maybe it's worth trying the CUPS protocol. I couldn't find any equivalent capability for the Brother.

Anyway, If anyone has succeeded with the IBM 4019 (nonPostscript), or, for that matter, with the Brother, I'd be most grateful to have the details.
Nick

[Dinky]

CUPS comes with built in printer drivers.  My networked HP LaserJet4 is one of those.
Build 650 and simple yum install of CUPS seems to get all working -- no extra steps.
However, the first job stops after the queue is processed and subsequent jobs stop
(pings to printer are ok).  Anyone know where the error_log is ?  The Debug has been
turned on per comment in cupsd.conf and any logs should give me a clue.

[Dinky]

Found answer to my CUPS question -- missing directory.  Examined /etc/init.d/cups
options section restartlog.  Logs showed that real problem was that ghostscript was
not installed by cups install.

For the CUPS built in printers, only these steps are needed:

           yum install ghostscript
           yum install cups

Then CUPS print manager can be run by a browser:

            http://localhost:631/admin

I use the xo browser with a slightly edited /etc/cups/cupsd.conf  .
Used nano to comment out (# sign at beginning of line) any "required user" lines.
This bypasses need for login screens, which appear to be removed on the xo.
Alternatively, printer configuration programs can be installed  or  printers.conf
can be directly edited as given in earlier posts on this topic.

Many printers will accept output from one of the CUPS built in printer drivers --
for basic printing.  In my case, the JetDirect driver using the configuration
socket://192.168.1.101:9100 works on my home wireless network.

[Grampa]

This is helpful, as it will probably allow me to get rid of the huge set of HP drivers I've installed. Of course I will probably lose scanner support and other bells and whistles that HPLIP offers.

I did earlier try the cups only approach, but I had some trouble configuring the cups driver because it wouldn't take my password. I think your "required user" modification may fix that.

[Dinky]

You should still be able to manage your printers with CUPS print manager.  The
"built in" printers are simply the ones in /usr/share/cups/model  .   If your printer
driver description (ppd or ppd.gz)  is in that directory, it will show up in CUPS
print manager's list of printers and it can be selected and configured (guessing)
with its ppd.  I do not know anything about "backend" drivers.  The hard part is
getting the ppd's and wrappers for a printer.

Mostly, I needed only basic printing and it could be had for very little effort.
One just needs to know or (guess) if their printer supports one of the widely used
protocols.

[DoverSharp]

I followed an amalgam of Pearson and Grampa's guides... needed HPLIP for my
HP PSC 2210xi via USB. With care and persistence and about
6 hours, I got my XO printing
quite nicely, mainly from the Sea Monkey browser.  My daughter is enchanted with
Google Calendar and wanted to print out... ended up installing Acrobat Reader to
do so, it worked fine too.  Thanks Grampa and this forum for all the help.

[Nick Tindall]

Hey Dinky, thanks to your (first) post of 2008/03/26, I was able to print successfully to my Brother MFC-420CN. My problem also was missing Postscript; I should have remembered that Postscript is central to page rendering on Unix. 

But I have a question: how did you figure out from the logs that lack of Postscript was your problem?

I did once see something in a log about being unable to load postscript.dll, but later when I reinstalled CUPS and tried to print with it, still without Postscript, there was no useful information in any logs that I could find (itself a challenge in Linux).

I must say these forums are a godsend. 

[Dinky]

In answer to your question, I was missing ghostscript.
As note in earlier post, the option section restartlog pointed to where log should be.
The directory was missing, so I created it and log appeared.  The log entries showed that
the file gs was missing.  gs was an alias for ghostscript.  After yum install of ghostscript,
the directory was created automatically (previously had been erased on each shutdown/power up).   The cups manager showed that logs were kept somewhere --
just a matter of finding where.

[Nick Tindall]

Oops. I meant to say that I'd seen that cups couldn't load ghostscript.dll (I think...this was a while ago). Anyway, thanks to your advice, as soon as I included yum install ghostscript in my printer setup, everything worked like a charm.

Thanks again for that...and for the additional detail about the log location and problem solving. I was greping the logs for "script." Kinda explains why I didn't find "gs" eh!