printing to a windows printer via smb/cups!

ferg

Hi all,

well I'm completely stumped!!

I've been making the transition from Debian to Gentoo over the last month or two. So far I have everything working teh way I like it except one small matter! I cannot for the life of me get Cups to print to a windows printer.

I had this setup working perfectly under Debian. Using Qtcups I was able to print perfectly to the Epson 640 on the windows 2000 machine.

Now using Gentoo I am stuck. I initially just copied my cups and samba files across from the Debian partition, and after adding the users and synchronising passwords using smbpasswd, I tried to get things working. Now file sharing from the windows machine works perfectly as before. However CUPS coudl not access the windows printer. So I browsed the forums and documentation and found quite a few install guides. I followed these, but still no printing!!

At the moment I can print to this machine by doing the following

1, I've a 2nd espon printer setup using Cups, which prints to a file.
2, using the following command I then print the file to the windows printer, cat ./temp/printfile.prn | smbclient //fluffy/epson password -c "print -"

This works fine!!

Now why on earth can cups not do this?

Note fluffy is the windows machine, and epson is the printer.

My printer.conf is:-
# Printer configuration file for CUPS v1.1.14
# Written by cupsd on Mon Jan 13 11:55:27 2003
<DefaultPrinter epson>
Location fluffy
DeviceURI smb://user:password@fluffy/epson
State Idle
Accepting Yes
JobSheets none none
QuotaPeriod 0
PageLimit 0
KLimit 0
</Printer>
<Printer File>
Location scotgate2
DeviceURI file:/home/chris/temp/printfile.prn
State Idle
Accepting Yes
JobSheets none none
QuotaPeriod 0
PageLimit 0
KLimit 0
</Printer>

If anybody requires any more information, please tell me!

Cheers
Chris

cyfred · Retired Dev Joined: 23 Aug 2002 Posts: 596

Did you follow the gentoo printing howto through?
[url] http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/printing-howto.xml [/url]

Which foomatic-configure command did you use? If the printer you are trying to print too has more than one listed driver try using that different driver/s and see if that helps?

ferg · Posted: Mon Jan 13, 2003 2:38 pm Post subject: update

Hi,

Thanks fro replying. Yes I followed those instructions to get it going!

However, since I posted, I've been playing further with my setup. I noticed that somebody had posted that they could print from apps, but not a test page using the web cups interface!

Well I tried this and nothing happened. Then I realised that a job was blocking teh queue. So I deleted all jobs, then tried lpr textfile.txt. This printed fine!!

So I tried to print from Mozilla. Fine!!!

However I stil cannot print a test page from the Cups web interface!! Weird!!

Anyway at least i can print!!!!

One thing though, under Debian with the gimp-print-drivers I could select just one driver, and then use qrcups to adjust teh quality settings etc... However under Gentoo the advanced tab option under qtcups-properties, is greyed out.

Do I have to setup different drivers, and then configure them, to use different quality settings?

I'll keep playing and see if I can figure this out, but any advice would be msot welcome!!

Cheers
Ferg

cyfred · Retired Dev Joined: 23 Aug 2002 Posts: 596

ferg · Posted: Tue Jan 14, 2003 6:11 pm Post subject:

Well QT is installed. QTcups would not run without this.

I'll try again though and re emerge qt and emerge cups again!

This problem is well weird though! I just do not understand why it is not working!!!!

Cheers
Ferg

lukin · n00b Joined: 12 Aug 2002 Posts: 8

I was propably having the same problem as you were - but I finally got it solved!

There seems to be a bug or something in the Cups versions 1.1.16 and 1.1.18 that prevents printing to win2000/xp printers.

It magically started working for me after I emerged Cups 1.1.15!

Maybe you will want to try this?
_________________
the most important thing about performing a rain dance is correct timing

rizzo · Posted: Sun Feb 16, 2003 4:13 am Post subject:

Hmm I'm having problems printint to my Win2000 printer. I'm downgrading back to CUPS 1.1.15. Is this problem documented somewhere? Is there a bug report or solution from the CUPS team?

Basically my printer shows up normal in CUPS, but when I print nothing comes out, but no problem is reported from CUPS either.

rizzo · Posted: Sun Feb 16, 2003 4:35 am Post subject:

Well I downgraded and get the same behavior. Then I thought perhaps I need to recompiled gimp-print-cups. However doing this forces me to upgrade cups back to 1.1.18-r4.

I'd really like to know what is up with printing to windows 2000.

update: I noticed that gimp-print-cups-4.3.8-r1 is the only gimp-print-cups ebuild that requires cups 1.1.18. The others don't specify a version. I'll drop downgrading gimp-print-cups as well.

rizzo · Posted: Sun Feb 16, 2003 10:58 pm Post subject:

Well I downgraded to gimp-print-cups 4.3.8 with cups 1.1.15-r2. Now when I try to print (test page) it says that the jobs were cancelled immediately.

If anyone helps me get this working, I'll buy dinner. Assuming you like dinner salads and water.

n0n · Guru Joined: 13 Jun 2002 Posts: 355

rizzo · Posted: Tue Feb 18, 2003 1:28 am Post subject:

edoloughlin · n00b Joined: 02 Oct 2002 Posts: 12 Location: Ireland

rizzo · Posted: Tue Feb 18, 2003 2:45 pm Post subject:

Yeah I have ghostscript 7.05.5-r2 installed, but I had to drop down to a lower version of cups and gimp-print-cups to get it work in Win2000. Although it doesn't really work so what do I know.

I just noticed that when I try to print a test page from the cups page it says "Job XX queued on CanonBJC by ''." However when i try to print a normal page from mozilla it says "Job XX queued on CanonBJC by 'rizzo'.", with the username this time. Although it doesn't matter since both fail with that "Unable to convert" error.

rizzo · Posted: Tue Feb 18, 2003 3:14 pm Post subject:

FYI I'm using (or trying to) the gimp-print-ijs driver for my Canon BJC-3000 printer.

edoloughlin · n00b Joined: 02 Oct 2002 Posts: 12 Location: Ireland

rizzo · Posted: Tue Feb 18, 2003 4:11 pm Post subject:

Progress :p Based on your advice I re-installed ghostscript 7.05.5-r2. I then restarted cups and this is what I get when i try to print a webpage from moz: