Your replies are appreciated. As soon as I get time, I will try your suggestions.

Thanks.

I appreciate the contribution of you all. I did not solve that printer issue yet. Without enough time I just put it aside. I will try your solutions thoroughly one at a time.

I work in root mode. I have a print.ps file. This file is in the /root folder. I am working from the /root folder to issue the commands.

I am working porteus (slax derivative). Here is the output I get with Ed solution :

bash-4.1# su -c 'chmod gou+rwx /dev/usb/lp0'
bash-4.1# gs -dNOPAUSE -dSAFER -sDEVICE=hl1250 -sOutputFile=/dev/usb/lp0 \
> -dDOINTERPOLATE -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -r600 file.ps -c quit
GPL Ghostscript 9.00 (2010-09-14)
Copyright (C) 2010 Artifex Software, Inc. All rights reserved.
This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file PUBLIC for details.
Error: /undefinedfilename in (file.ps)
Operand stack:

Execution stack:
%interp_exit .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- false 1 %stopped_push
Dictionary stack:
--dict:1158/1684(ro)(G)-- --dict:0/20(G)-- --dict:77/200(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
Last OS error: 2
GPL Ghostscript 9.00: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1
bash-4.1#

Hi,

IIRC, Porteus is a x86_64 derivative of Slackware. To get the Brother printer drivers to work, you have to install Eric Hameleers' multilib packages. The base multilib packages (glibc, ...) are sufficient.

I have a Brother HL-2030 laser printer connected to a Slackware64 server. I downloaded the two RPMs from the Brother website, converted them with rpm2tgz and installed them using installpkg. I took a peek at the cupswrapper script in /usr/local/Brother/cupswrapper and created a symlink for the right CUPS location.

Then I ran the cupswrapper script

After this operation, the printer must show :

Forget the Gutenprint drivers. They don't work with this printer.

Hi Francois,
You need to change 'file.ps' to 'print.ps' in the above command line. Ghostscript's rather cryptic error message is saying that it can't open the file.

The Ghostscript command should work. Ghostscript must work in order for any of the other solutions to work.
Ed

I agree with kikinovak http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ml#post4474216

I have two Brother printers installed using the Brother packages and they did not work until I installed multilib.

@EdGr:

The procedure you proposed did work. As you wrote, all I had to do was to change file.ps for print.ps. From here, do you have some suggestions to refine the process?

1) I imagine I could build some kind of script to make the process more efficient.
2) I used to work with openoffice (ver. 3.2.1). I do not see .ps in the file format. Which word processor do you use?
3) Any other suggestion?

@kikinovak and arubin:
There are two versions of Porteus. I am working on Porteus v 1.0 32-bit that has KDE-3.5.12 Trinity. Thus multilib should not be missing. But your procedure introduce something I did not try yet. So I will try it soon.

Thanks.

That's good. I use a script for the Ghostscript command. Ghostscript doesn't need run as root as long as /dev/usb/lp0 is world writable.

I use Kword, but pretty much all Unix applications have an option to "Print to Postscript file".

Now that the printer works, you may want to set up CUPS to have a print spooler. That may require Brother's drivers. I didn't do that because I print so infrequently that writing a script was less work.
Ed

@kikinovak:

Finally, I did install porteus 64 bit on a second machine. I also installed from the brother site the following drivers transformed with rpm2xzm into slackware equivalents:
-brhl2170wlpr-2.0.2-1.i386.rpm
-cupswrapperHL2170W-2.0.2-1.i386.rpm

I also installed the multilib equivalent of porteus called compat.xzm permitting 32 bit packages to be run under 64 bit.


A) Following your instructions:
4.1# ln -s /etc/rc.d/rc.cups /etc/init.d/cups
bash-4.1# ./cupswrapper
bash: ./cupswrapper: No such file or directory
bash-4.1# lpstat -t
scheduler is not running
no system default destination
lpstat: Connection refused
lpstat: Connection refused
lpstat: Connection refused
lpstat: Connection refused
lpstat: Connection refused

B) According to another thread, see:
http://www.slax.org/forum.php?action...parentID=33379

I did edit file: /usr/local/Brother/cupswrapper/cupswrapperHL2170W-2.0.2
changing: port=usb:/dev/usb/lp0
for port=usb://Brother/HL-2170W%20series

Then I got the following output:
4.1# /usr/local/Brother/cupswrapper/cupswrapperHL2170W-2.0.2 -i
cups: restarted scheduler. [ OK ]
lpinfo: Connection refused
lpinfo: Connection refused
lpadmin: Unable to connect to server: Connection refused

What do you think?

I have this model, and though it is not using brother's official drivers, you can just use the PCL6 driver that cups already has built in (just go through the add printer dialog at localhost:631 )and it prints perfectly fine.

Finally, the solution was simpler than I thought. Only step 2 was necessary, that is installing only the gutenprint and ghostscript (both) packages.

In addition, with gutenprint installed as hl2170w does not show on as a possible printer, using the hl1040 did the job.

The addition of brhl2170wlpr-2.0.2-1.i386.xzm
and cupswrapperHL2170W-2.0.2-1.i386.xzm (converted with rpm2lzm and then with lzm2xzm) would bug the CUPS system, yielding the 500 internal server error.

I still have to resolve the way to add other printer drivers not included in the available list. It seems that ppd from the linux foundation could be a strategy. However, their server has been down for days.