Re: cups and hpijs driver

[Donald R. Spoon]

Michael Olds wrote:

I'm catching up to this one late, and am being thrown off by the very start.

I have a DeskJet 960C

Same printer here.  Works great with CUPS.

I am pretty sure it's hooked up right as it was running under RedHat
(meaning I have PnP turned off in the BIOS) and during one point in playing
around tonight I saw that something knew the printer was there.(don't ask,
I've been trying to find it again and can't).

I have installed the foomatic.bin and foomatic.db and cupsys and it's
depends
and have generated and saved in /usr/share/cups/model/HP-DeskJet`.ppd

If you are running KDE, install the kdelibs3-cups package and use the KDE "Control Center"-->"System"-->"Printing Manager" to get to the setup Wizzard. Make sure you choose "CUPS" as your printing system.

I would also suggest the following additional packages be installed:
cupsys-client
cupsys-bsd
foomatic-db-gimpprint
hpijs

In addition, I have found the cupsys-driver-gimpprint drivers to be of fairly high quality. I use the "HP Deskjet 900 series" driver there. If you want to "roll your own" PPD for the 960C, then go to www.linuxprinting.org, look up your printer and / or the hpjis "driver" and generate a specific PPD for it. It offers a mildly better color printing resolution than the gimpprint drivers and access to some extra functions on the 960C, but it is slower here.

But when I type lpadmin in the terminal I get unknown command and when I use
the web interface I am thrown by the first three questions (I think I
understand what follows!):
Name: what name? Is that just an I make it up name? DeskJet 960C?

Yep...whatever you want to call it! It is nice to call it something like "lp" so that other programs that look for "lp" will find it, but this is not necessary. Keep it short... reduces typing <grin>. This entry is MUST, since that is the "name" the system will use to identify this specific printer. It is not much of a concern with a single printer, but on a network with several printers available for use it helps distinguish them.

The Help
file says the helpful wizzard will walk you through this and you just answer
a few obvious questions! Not obvious to me.

The only "wizzard" I have found is in the KDE Printing Manager. It is quite helpful. You can only get this for CUPS if you have the kdelibs3-cups package installed. IMHO, it is easier than the web interface.

Locatin: what location? and if this is the /dev/lp or lp0 or lp1 can I just
go and assign that?

Location is where the printer is physically located. This is mainly useful for sharing a printer on a network. You wouldn't want to print something out on a printer across campus for example. In my case the "location" is "Basement" (of my house). Not mandatory

Description I can guess is nothing important.

Again, useful on a network, where you might want to tell a remote user the capabilities and limitations (color, b&W, resolution, speed, etc). Not mandatory

Thanks for any help and sorry if this was already covered. I would like to
get a printer hooked up to the rig.

Best Wishes!
Mike Olds www.buddhadust.org

Good Luck! I struggled with this setup for quite a while, but once I got it going, it works great. Holler if you need more help...especially if you want to put it on a network. I found there were a few "gotchas" in setting it up for a network, however setting it up for use on the computer where it is attached is fairly straight-forward.

-Don Spoon-




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