Printing to windows printer without drivers?

silversky · 02-19-2004, 08:25 PM

Hey! I am moving my HP PSC 1210 printer to my linux box for network printing instead of having it just be on my winxp box. Everything runs fine on the linux box, I can print from it, etc. However, there is no windows driver available for this printer to run without being plugged into the usb port of the computer printing to it. The drivers are carefully hidden in an installation cd that requires the printer to be installed before instlling drivers, and for that to work the computer sending to the printer has to have so much ram, usb support, etc. This would have worked fine on an older deskjet or a laser.

Is there any way I can set the print server (slackware box over lan) up in Samba so that the windows printers just need postscript installed, then have the slackware box convert postscript to hpijs and send the hpijs data to the printer?

Thanks!

silversky · 02-20-2004, 02:02 PM

22 people have read this and nobody knows yet?

TSloth · 03-08-2004, 07:16 PM

>Is there any way I can set the print server (slackware box over lan) up in Samba so that the windows printers just need postscript installed, then have the slackware box convert postscript to hpijs and send the hpijs data to the printer?

Have you solved this yet? If so, please post your learnings.

>... there is no windows driver available for this printer to run without being plugged into the usb port of the computer printing to it. The drivers are carefully hidden in an installation cd that requires the printer to be installed before instlling drivers ...

It might work to connect the printer to a Windows system, install the drivers, ***, then go into printer properties and chagne the "Print to the following port" field to a Samba share, like "\\linuxbox\printersharename", then move the printer to the Samba server.

A side note, at the *** above, you could share the printer on your Windows system, then connect to it from all the other windows systems you have, which would copy the necessary driver files to all the windows clients, then change all of the printer properties to point to the Samba share. (May easier than re-installing from CD on each machine.)

Let us know if this works, or whatever other way you solve the problem.

- TSloth