Re: Printer setup? - sorry, previous mail was empty...

[Woodchuck <marmot%pennswoods.net@localhost>]

On Sun, 8 Jun 2008, netbsd unix wrote:

> My printer is a HP Photosmart C3180 (connected through USB on ulpt0; 
> interestingly also recognised as /dev/sd0), but I would prefer this not to be 
> relevant in the setup. (I want to be able to tell my friends how it's done 
> for their printers, that's why.) So... how do I do it? Thank you in advance 
> for your kind help. Just for your information, in Linux (Xubuntu) the printer 
> works perfectly fine (however, there I had some GUI setup, maybe it did 
> something different than what should be done here).

Where it's connected *has* to be relevant.  Otherwise nobody knows where
it is, eh?

> 
> What I tried so far:
> 
> lptest 70 5
> 
> just gave me the staircase problem (and printed EXTREMELY slowly), but I 
> guess this is not such an issue; I considered printing my files either 
> through a printerfilter, or using unix2dos before printing.

Get it working a little better first.  Then man printcap and look
at the various filters.  Big section on this.  You may wish to write
an output filter ("of") to call tr to add cr or whatever.  First
get lpd/lpr/lpq/lpc/lprm to work, though.

Also look at your printer manual.  Usually there's a way to make the damned
thing "act decent" wrt to cr/lf pairs.  Some sort of DIP switch, perhaps,
or other configuration option.


> So, I wrote in /etc/printcap:
> 
> lp|local printer experiment:\
> :lp=/dev/lpa0:sd=/var/spool/lpd/lp:lf=/var/log/lpd-errors:\
> :sh:pl#66:pw#80:if=/usr/libexec/lpr/lpf:

Note, the printer is on, you say, /dev/ulpt0?  Then that should also
be in your printcap, not /dev/lpa0, which is an empty or nonexistent
parallel port.

Also, the slowness can be sometimes changed by going to /dev/ulpa0,
which I think uses a polled instead of an interrupt driven driver.
See the man page for ulpt and/or ulpa and/or lpt lpa.

Keep your name however you please, no matter what some ill-mannered
lout threatens you with.  People get my name if they want to send
me a present or sleep with me.  But it would be nice if you used fmt
to format your posts to 72 columns.

> (By the way, I found out, there is no directory /usr/local - the NetBSD guide 
> chapter 12 still refers to that directory.)

Well, there ought to be ;-)  Where else should software not part of
pkg be reasonably placed?

> 
> Then I did something like
> 
> cd /var/spool/lpd
> mkdir lp
> chown daemon:daemon lp
> chmod 770 lp
> 
> I rebooted... I tried lptest 70 5 | lp  as well as lptest 70 5 | lpr
> 
> ...and it prints NOTHING.

Use lpq and lpc -- you'll probably find your test jobs spooled, waiting
for you to buy and install a printer on lpa0.  

Use lprm to get rid of them ;-)

Mostly I'm an OpenBSD user.  I read this list when I tire of the
bickering and gratuitous flamage on misc@openbsd.  I see it's spreading
to nym flames and "USE LINUX" (aka CUPS) attacks here.

This poster doesn't want to hear about CUPS or other Penguinware, and for
damned good reasons. Sheesh.  Next you'll tell him to install gnome in
order to get a working printer.

Dave the Woodchuck
-- 
               The future isn't what it used to be.
                             -- G'kar