simple printer question
 

...at least it should be simple.

I'm running slackware 10.0 and I just want to get my printer working. I don't want to do anything fancy. I don't want to have it on a network. The only people that will use it will be users of the actual workstation it's attached to. I don't care whether I use CUPS or lpr. I just want to be able to print out text files, web pages, and word documents. ...A simple desire I would think.

Anyway heres what I can tell you that I think may be relevant and useful:

It's a USB printer "hpdeskjet 940c". I have hotplugging turned on and my USB mouse works perfectly. If I just do "lpr something.txt" It makes three attempts and says its trying to print to missingprinter@localhost, and goes on to say it cannot open connection to local host, then says make sure the remote host supports the LPD protocol. After the 3 attempts it just gives up.

Sorry if this has been asked before, all my searching just ended up with me finding people who wanted to do printing over a network.

I use redhat linux 9, and it has a very simple config tool for setting up printers. I think you must configure the printer using a config tool first. I have a hpdeskjet 920c, very similar to your's. It is also connected via USB. And you need all the drivers, too. rh9 automatically installs al hp print drivers by default. Try googling for "hp printer drivers" and "GUI printer config tool".

Now I use Slackware so basically anything that applies to red hat is not necessarily guaranteed to apply for Slackware. Sure I may need a configuration tool but which one? First thing I need to know is whether to use CUPS or LPRng or something else. Then I can go about trying to figure out how to configure it.

As far as the driver goes I need to know whether there's something already available on Slack before I try to install something twice. Assuming I find that I have no printer drivers installed this looks promising:

http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_pr...P-DeskJet_940C

So maybe some more specific questions would help here:

Q: From the shell is there any way to tell if I have printer drivers already installed and what they are?

Q: From the shell is there any way to tell what my computer knows about the printer attached to it through usb?

Q: What is easiest to get a usb printer up and running CUPS or LPRng? (remember I don't want to network it)

I tried "dmesg" here's the relevant info...First it seems to try a bunch of drivers and fails a lot but then comes to what we have here:

usb.c: registered new driver usblp
printer.c: usblp0: USB Bidirectional printer dev2 if 0 alt 0 proto 2 vid 0x03F0 pid 0x1604
printer.c: v0.13 USB Printer Device Class driver

Ok, maybe type locate hpijs at a prompt. Hpijs is the most common drivers used in linux to use hp printers.

In my experience LPRng and Cups do not play well together on the same machine. If you want to use LPRng and have Cups installed use pkgtool to remove Cups, and then re-install LPRng.

Now, how I got LPRng working on my computer was by using the apsfilter utility.

As root cd to /usr/share/apsfilter and run SETUP (type ./SETUP) at that point it starts walking you through setting up a printer. One thing to remember is that when you are doen you have to (I)nstall the printer before quitting,

I am probably wrong, but all I have had to do to set up my printers (Slack 10, USB) is open a browser and point it to http://localhost:631

Enter root password when asked and then enter relevant info into the boxes.

I know that Shilo's excellent pages on setting up Slack recommend not installing CUPS and lpr together, so perhaps remove lpr and re-install CUPS.

Don't forget Linuxprinting.org has loads of good info.

hth

mark

I was having a problem setting up cups (installed during slackware install). what I did was uninstall it, reinstall it. they have a nifty admin manual at the cups webpage http://www.cups.org/documentation.php just follow those instructions and you can set up your printers.

after you install cups, goto http://localhost:631/admin

This is quite possibly the stupidest linux-related problem I've had yet. So it turns out when I installed Slackware because of my general paranoia I had almost all of the daemons turned off for security purposes. All I had to do was do a "pkgtool" and then navigate from there to run the configuration script for the CUPS daemon. I then rebooted to make sure it turned on. Setting it up was as easy as pointing mozilla to http://localhost:631 messing around with some settings... realizing my usb cable was unplugged... plugging it back in and getting it to work. Lesson learned:

Always check the simplest most stupid things first.

But I do have one more question....

How would I have gotten the daemon to run w/o a restart?

Linux people are usually proud of being able to go eons without rebooting so I may as well jump on the bandwagon. :)

If the daemon wasn't running then cupsd start should do it.