On Monday 10 September 2001 05:03 pm, Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS wrote: > Firstly, is there a recommended way of doing printing with Debian? I > see various mentions of LPD, LPRng, CUPS, PDQ and printtool, and there > are a large number of printer-related packages in the archive, many of > which conflict with one another, but I can't find a document to help > me decide what to install.
I don't know what the recommended way is, but I use CUPS myself. > I tried printtool, but it says it can't find my parallel port. Well, > the printer does react when I do "modprobe parport_pc" or "echo foo > > /dev/lp0", so there is some kind of physical connection. That's a good start. If you know what port it is, you're over the first hurdle. > My printer's a Canon BJC-4300 and it has worked with Debian before, > but it was years ago and I can't remember how I did it. Chances are > everything will have changed by now, anyway. Yeah, I suspect it has. I'd take a look at the linux printing Web site, http://www.linuxprinting.org/ It has lots of info on supported printers and under what printing driver and method those printers can be used. In fact, you're in luck. http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=60544 Your printer has perfect support. Getting the stp driver and friends setup was a bit of a challenge. I'm not sure how I did it now, since I set it up last August and just copied everything over to this system until things worked properly. It did get it all working under Potato and it works presently in Woody, both with the latest CUPS. The CUPS in Potato is too old. You'll want to use the versions at their Web site if you're on Potato. You could probably apt-get source too. > Yes, I did look at The Printing HOWTO, but it doesn't say very much > about parallel ports and I can't have much confidence in a document > that talks about "kernels >= 2.1.33" when I'm running 2.4.8. > > Edmund
