Network printing with HPIJS (Macosx? Sorry, yes)
 

Not really sure where to put this, but networking seemed like a logical place. I love this forum and if you can help me I will be forever indebted to you....okay, here goes:


I have been using ubuntu linux for some eight or nine months now, and still am. It is the only linux machine on a network with three windows machines (just a basic windows workgroup setup) which all share two printers (both attached to one desktop in the office - an HP Laserjet 2200 via USB cable and an HP Business inkjet 2230 via parallel cable). You, I'm sure, won't be surprised to hear that the linux desktop prints and interfaces flawlessly.

I cannot get the same results with my brand new MacBook Pro (I realize this is not a Mac help forum, bear with me). At first, with HPs drivers, it simply wouldn't send anything to the printer. Since the Mac OS is *nix based, I looked into setting it up identically to my ubuntu box. Lo and behold, there is a hpijs package for mac, I copied over the linux ppd, and now I almost have it working, I just have a few problems:

• Now when I try to print, the data takes forever to reach the printer. Not forever to send from my computer, the printer just blinks the status light for a really long time before starting.
• Also, when the print job is done, the light keeps blinking and the LCD on the printer still reads printing. It remains locked up until rebooted

Okay, that's all really background information :)

My question is, where are all of the setting files located that might have that one crazy specific setting I can match up somewhere on my mac to fix this? It clearly isn't in the ppd driver file, but I feel like I'm so close, and working through a GUI doesn't seem like it's going to cut it. I'm sorry this post is so long, but I wanted to be complete.

Thanks in advance. Hell, thanks just for reading :)
-Plastech

That's an adventurous way of going at it.

We set up all our HP printers (and other printers) on our Sun servers, run Samba, and share the printers through Samba. This gives us a lot of control of access. The point that might matter for you is that our Mac OS X desktops simply add a printer using smb://server.our.network/printer, or just browsing the local windows network neighborhood, finding a server, and choosing a printer.

Seems like it should work in your situation.

Sadly the printers are not mine, which limits my ability to move them. Some further investigation is showing that hpijs is problematic in both linux and mac osx. I think the issue is that what gets spooled on the xp desktop is a document named "Remote Downlevel Document" owned by "Guest" with a page count of "N/A". I think the N/A is the issue here; I think that without some sort of terminating signal, the printer simply cannot terminate its print job.

No need to move them. My point was that if they are already shared among the windows machines, then the Mac OS X system should be able to access them using smb. Our use of Samba on Solaris to share out our printers is just a way of mimicking the windows printer sharing. That's what Samba is all about -- a reverse engineering of windows sharing.