Peter's Blog

Printing in Linux

Printing in Linux: it doesn't go automatic. Ok, one can say you just have to follow the Gentoo Printing Guide wich is very clear and makes installing a printer very, very easy (just a few commands), but I think we could expect more, especially more automated and integrated in gnome.

First off all, when you have a plain linux installation, gnome and all stuff you need, with no printing devices configured: printing works. You can just print a file without configuring a printer. The big problem is that the printed document doesn't look very good. A plain color is made of textures for example, looks like printing with the first color printers or with kind of colored-grayscales. Off course I want better, so I followed the gentoo guide.

What is it all about? First of all you need to have cups and foomatic installed. No problem, cups should be installed as dependency of gnome and you still can install foomatic if you need it. Maybe CUPS/Gnome could advice you to install foomatic when configuring a printer that has some benefits when having foomatic installed. If you have an HP Deskjet printer, you also need to install the HPIJS driver wich acts like a postscript interpreter between the postscript output and the printer device. Also this one could be recommened when configuring a HP device in CUPS/Gnome. That's all for software requirements. The configuration could be automated more. Normally, you have to create a PPD-file for your printer by hand (just give the model and hardware number to foomatic) or download the right one from linuxprinting.org and place it in the cups directory. I think it must be possible to grep the required information when attaching a printer device with USB. When connecting, gnome should detect the right model, generate the appropriate ppd file and install the printer in cups. Maybe a dialog box should appear informing the user that the printer is added to cups and asking if he/she wants to review the configuration or sharing properties. This would be a real integrated desktop experience.

This entry was posted on May 27, 2005 at 02:57:42 and is filed under Vrije Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or leave a response (below) , or trackback from your own site .

5 response(s) to Printing in Linux

1. Ikke [Visitor] says:
   

   This does exist already: RedHat's PrinterManager (also used in Ubunut if I'm not mistaken).
   Based on HAL, CUPS can autoconfigure new USB or PNP parallel printers.
   The problem is: this needs a patched CUPS version, and afaik the CUPS maintainers are not willing to incorporate the patch in the vendor distribution...
   
   Check hal-list@freedesktop for more info.

   · 27-05-05 @ 07:18
2. RealNitro [Visitor] says:
   

   What I would like to see are features like software-based double sided printing, and being able to change the printer setting from the program your printing from. (with or without giving the root password)

   · 27-05-05 @ 18:25
3. Peter [Member] says:
   

   Would be a nice feature, indeed.
   
   Another nice feature could be printing more pages on one sheet of paper. You can allready do something like that with psnup/pdfnup (package pdfjam/psjam), but it would be nice if that's integrated in the gnome printing system.

   · 27-05-05 @ 22:21
4. gfg [Visitor] says:
   

   Probably the most useful page on Linuxprinting:
   http://www.linuxprinting.org/suggested.html
   
   If you buy one of the printers on that page, it will be sometimes even work better under Linux, FreeBSD,.. than under Windows... :)

   · 30-05-05 @ 00:15
5. Peter [Member] says:
   

   Thanks!
   
   As you can see there, they suggest using HP and Epson instead of other brands. For HP, they have following line:
   
   "HP's low-end 33xx-, 34xx-, 36xx-, and 37xx-series inkjets work poorly and are not recommended, so if you like to have a cheap HP inkjet you should at least take one of the 38xx series."
   
   I do have an HP 3816, so it should be OK. It is OK, indeed, if you do the necessary installs/configures. It isn't difficult, but I think it should be more automated.

   · 30-05-05 @ 05:28

Name:

Email:

Your email address will not be displayed on this site.

Site/Url:

Your URL will be displayed.

Comment text:

Allowed XHTML tags: <p, ul, ol, li, dl, dt, dd, address, blockquote, ins, del, span, bdo, br, em, strong, dfn, code, samp, kdb, var, cite, abbr, acronym, q, sub, sup, tt, i, b, big, small, a>

Options:

Auto-BR (Line breaks become <br />)
Remember me (Set cookies for name, email and url)
Allow message form (Allow users to contact you through a message form (your email will NOT be displayed.))