samba - Oct 2001 - YASNPP - [Yet Another Stupid Newbie Printing Problem]

Hi all,

I have a small peer-to-peer network of machines (3 * W98, 1 * Redhat7.1)
with two printers (1 * HP6L, 1 * Lexmark Z22) hanging off the back of
one of the W98 machines and have an odd problem. I am still a newbie
with Linux, finally getting things up and running (sort of) after
several weeks of fiddling around and innumerable reinstalls. I've
finally seemed to have got Samba working-ish. My Windoze machines can
see files on the Linux box and, for the most part, that's good enough
for me. I do, however, have a need to print from the Linux box and it's
this requirement that's causing grief. Please excuse my ignorance but
I'm ankle-deep in FAQs, tips&trix, how-tos, etc and am now completely
confused.

I added both of the printers using the Printer Config app (running KDE)
and they both printed test pages just fine. 

If I start up the KDE Text Editor and print (the 'services' file being
long enough for a decent test) then, to the HP everything is fine while
the Lexmark prints a line of narrow black bands and then barfs.

If I try printing from the Advanced Editor then nothing at all happens
on either printer and Windoze doesn't appear to receive anything.

If I try and print out one of the HTML help pages from Netscape then, to
the Lexmark, it will print the first page (with no concept of
economy-mode, even though it's set. It floods the paper with ink) and
then barfs. Sending the same page to the HP will get it to print out 40+
(I killed it at 40-something when I noticed what was happening) pages of
garbage; each page one line of random characters.

I realise that it's my ignorance that's causing the problem (or suspect
it is) so I will apologise in advance for my newbieism and hope that
some kind guru in this forum will be willing to submit to a few minutes
of hand-holding and help me solve this.

Any advice, pointers, cures will be gratefully received. (But please
keep it simple, I'm easily confused. <g>)

TIA

-- 
-- 
**************************************************************
Ian Jennings
Microware Data Services Ltd.

This post is made entirely from recycyled ones and noughts
**************************************************************

The best advice is just to transfer all your files to windows and let
windows print them.
If you reject this advice, you will have to learn about:
1. Postscript
2. enscript
3. lpr and lprng
4. printer filters
5. print queues
6. God know what else.

Knowing nothing about GUI tools for setting up printers (they never work for
me), likely, you have two print queues in /etc/printcap for each printer.
One is a "raw" queue, with no filtering, and the other is a filtered
queue.
The test pages printed fine because, likely, the test page was sent to the
raw queue, or maybe the filtered queue, and your real print jobs are being
sent to the other queue. (Keep in mind that windows does no filtering of the
files you send to it to print.)
Most (?All) linux applications product postscript output when they print.
So, if you print a page from netscape or staroffice, a postscript file is
generated. All print filters expect postscript input.
There is a problem in RH 7.1. It doesn't install enscript by default.
Enscript is important. It encodes text files into postscript files which
then are converted, by your print filter, into a format understood by your
printer.
SO:
I would look at the /etc/printcap file and figure out which queues are
there.
Then, I would try sending a simple text file to each promising queue (not
the raw one!) with:
lpr -Pqueue FIleToPrint
If that fails (or, if it works!), try sending a postscript file the same way.
(The "file" command will show you what type of file it is).
To get postscript files to work with, just try printing to a file from netscape.
You can look at your postscript files with gv.
If the text files don't print, use locate enscript to see if it got
installed. It is, I believe, on your RH 7.1 cdrom.
Printing is one of the two biggest headaches in the linux world. (The other
is permissions.)
There is a commercial product out there which I haven't used for this
purpose, but, basically, it allows windows to print postscript files to its
printers, using those lovely windows printer drivers, not the awful, sorta
work,  print filters you get with linux. It even has a queue arrangement so
you just have to put your linux generated postscript files into the queue
directory, and the software takes over. I haven't sunk to that yet, but that
is an alternative to this bother.
Here is the link:
http://www.lerup.com/printfile/
If you are going to be using your windows machine as the print server, I
would definitely explore this option.
Joel