We have some Minolta Magicolor 2300 DeskLaser printers, which were quite cheap a year ago, but have no manufacturer's support on Linux.
Now we have some users (including me) who have Linux machines, and want to use those printers on Linux.
I found that some Linux guys made a great driver which seems to work basically, however, we have a big problem using their "driver": when we print from a Linux application, all printing options selected on the printing dialog of that application are totally ignored: no matter what page size I select, no matter if I select monochrome or color printing, or if I select simplex or duplex, the printer always prints Letter size, monochrome, simplex pages.
In the meantime I realized that Letter size, monochrome, simplex mode are the defaults in the printer's ppd file that came with the Linux "driver".
But that ppd file defines the other options, too, why are those ignored during printing?
Here are some more details:
The Linuxes we use are SuSE 9.1.
Here is the Linux "driver" we use:
http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/
This is how we installed it:
su -l
cd /usr/local
wget
http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/foo2zjs.tar.gz
tar zxf foo2zjs.tar.gz
cd foo2zjs
make
./getweb 2300 # Get Minolta 2300 DL .ICM files
make install
Then we opened up yast and added a new printer with the following parameters:
Print to remote lpd queue
Remote server: cminolta.foo.bar
Queue name: lp
Printer name: cminolta
Description: cminolta
Location: 192.168.0.147
Use local filter: Minolta Magicolor 2300 dl (foo2zjs/recommended)
Naturally, I could create several ppd files with different defaults until I cover all possible combinations of the selectable options and add several printers: one that prints A4/monochrome/simplex an other that prints A4/color/simplex, and so on, and select the appropriate one when printing, but this would be very clumsy: we would end up with a hundred printers each pointing to the same network printer but with different printing options.
I wonder if there is a better solution to use these printers on Linux?
Why are only the defaults in the ppd file used during printing, and the options selected on the printing dialog ignored?
