View Single Post
Old 5th November 2008
Oko's Avatar
Oko Oko is offline
Rc.conf Instructor
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Kosovo, Serbia
Posts: 1,102
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by JMJ_coder View Post
I'm revisiting this question as I setup my laptop to use my printer. I'm half tempted to just install cups and give that a go.
OK. Please, do not panic. CUPS is for enterprise printing. You do not have 300 printers and 35 different user groups. You do not want that cr*** on your pristine NetBSD machine.

I will give you three suggestions:

1. Note that your Brother HL-5240 (good choice by the way) also speaks Printer Command Language 6. Yes, I do know that theoretically it should be easier just to use as Post Script printer but sometimes the theory and practice are not the same.

2. Also look at Apsfilter. Apsfilter is the simple script which will allow you to install printer. Actually it will just generate proper printcap file for you. It can be used on Post Script Printers as well as the one using drivers from Ghostscript, Gutenprint, and HPIJS.

3. Finally, you can use the same PPD file you are using in CUPS without installing CUPS. Look at the foomatic-filter.

To answer your second question is more tricky. Whether you can use
LPR directly from Firefox or OpenOffice depends on the guy who ported it
to NetBSD. If he kept vanilla configuration than I assume that these applications will expect CUPS. However they will be more than happy to print to post script file which you can pipe to the printer.
You can obviously configure OpenOffice and Firefox to do this automatically.

The advantage of CUPS is that it speaks internet printing protocol IPP unlike LPR which speaks only lpr protocol.
The IPP allows printer to report back to the computer its status. In reality only very expensive printers speak full IPP. PPD files
among other things describe how to fake IPP conversation with the particular printer.

Cheers,
OKO

Last edited by Oko; 5th November 2008 at 06:01 PM.
Reply With Quote