Hello, I have an hp all in one printer connected into my xp box. I setup my xp box for printer sharing so my suse box can print remotely to my xp box. I set up my suse box to use LPD protocol to print to my xp box,the printer does work but the queue would get stuck in the xp box that is connected to the printer. I then setup samba to print to the xp box and the same thing happened. In the xp box, I can see the file in the queue that says is printing but nothing is happening.
When I print in the xp box alone, it will print no problem.
What could be the problem?

Here is the result of lpstat -t if it means anything. It seems to show that everything is fine. I changed the ip address for here. Hope I made sense of everything.

Thanks,

-bhert

I don't think I can help directly with LPD. What I can suggest is have a look here --> http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Printing-HOWTO/spoolers.html

LDP, LPR and Cups are given a good overview. In short, cups has become the most common way of printing with linux.

You will need a print driver for your printer. Have a look here -->http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/OpenPrinting

Printers are listed by manufacturer and what drivers are available. There are instructions on installing the drivers, etc.

I have my network set up so linux is the print server, running cups. Linux is set up as a Samba server. ( it can be a client also ). I have shared the printer through samba, and on the windoze machines you add the remote printer. It all works well. Right now I have a Brother printer, but I have used Lexmarks as well.

it is possible to use windoze as the server for linux as you want to. You have the printer working on windoze. The general approach would be, install cups. Find a suitable print driver for your printer, and instll it on your linux system. Then go into cups ( it uses a web interface ) and add the remote printer. Then you should be able to print.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for replying camorri. I already have the printer connected directly to windows box and also printer sharing set up so other computers on the lan can send print jobs to the windows box to print.
I don't have the printer on the suse box, I have setup samba to send the print job to the windows box and the same thing happens, the print job would get stuck in queue, I can see the file waiting to print in the queue.
When I am at the windows box and print a file, it works as expected. Doesn't make sense.
Didn't I set up windows as a print server? Thanks

Oh, I forgot, I got the info from:
http://swerdna.net.au/linhowtosambaprint.html
Thanks swerdna for the info. Close, but not quite there yet.

-bhert

Apparently, since no one has that kind of problem, I guess I will just have to save my suse box docs to the flash drive and use the windows box to print it. A kind of a pain but I will live.

-bhert

You never stated the model of the HP printer you have, or which driver you are using in linux. Could you post the information?

The link you posted looks good enough. From what I have seen, most users are using cups and samba to print to a windoze print server. That method is described in that tutorial. If you go back and re-read my first post, I described in general terms what the article says ( for adding a printer using cups + samba ).

Camorri, At the printer tutorial site where I posted the link above said nothing about a printer driver, so I assumed that I didn't need one.

My printer is HP DeskJetF300 all in one. I went to the site and downloaded a file called: HP-DeskJet_F300-hpijs.ppd
the site says that it mostly works.

Now when I get to the instructions about installing the drivers, I get confused about native postscript and ghostscript printer database. I typed gs -h in console and I don't think my printer is in there, I am not sure if I am reading the list right.
When I set up the printer in samba, my printer model was in the list.

can you kindly explain better how the installation works? Thanks.

-bhert

Here is the link that describes the driver for your F300.

http://openprinting.org/show_printer...P-DeskJet_F300

The driver is supplied by HP, and yes you need a driver in linux.

Big picture; when you do printing to any printer, the applications have no idea the capabilities of the printer you bought. After all, it could be one of thousands of printers. Printers are very different in how the software has to talk to them. The print driver sits between the application, like a word processor and the hardware printer. The application knows nothing about the special characters to do things like index the paper, tab etc. That how-to stuff is put in the driver.

Now if you are sending the file to a remote printer, it is not routed through the driver on the remote machine. That has to be done before you send the file. ( in linux ). So, without a driver in linux, you could only print very simple files, like character based files.

So, what you need in linux is a spooling program, like cups. There are other ( mostly older ) choices. Then you need a driver, to do the magic, so things like bit mapped files can be printer.

Now, that ppd file should allow you to print postscript files. However, that will be it without a driver. You would have to set up your word processor to create all postscript files. Now what about other apps? Can they produce postscript output? If yes, then you don't need the driver. If you want to get the most out of the printer, install the driver.

I'll see if I can find install instructions. The first thing you can try is look in the package manager for OpenSUSE to see if the hpijs driver is available for installation. ( I don't have OpenSUSE so I can't check. )

I'll post back with any information I can find on HP's site...

Hello again, I installed the .ppd file using http://localhost:631 and set up the printer and then made sure that hpijs was intalled and it is in /usr/bin/hpijs.

I then made a simple text file and used enscript to convert to .ps.

Since I have KDE, I viewed it at kghostview. The title, date and page number was in the .ps file.

I then proceeded to print the .ps file using default settings and I could hear the printer starting on the xp box in the next room but then stopped again.

I went to my xp box and looked at the queue and the file showed but on where the page # is supposed to be, it has ??? instead.

I figured maybe I did it wrong. What is the right way to do it?

Thanks

-bhert

Use the Cups interface, http://localhost:631. I think you need to click on Administration, and it should prompt you for the "Administrators" user ID and password. Use root and your root password. That will give you the authority to add printers.

From there, Add printer. It will take you through a series of boxes to input. As I remember it, the first page is not critical what you put in, things like location, and printer name. Use the name you gave the printer in windoze.

Next is the Device. Look at the list in the drop down. There are two things that may work. One is "Windows printer via Samba" and the other is "IPP" ( Internet Printing Protocol ). Click Continue.

Next is the Device URI. This is critical. There is a link to some help on this page. My system shows help for everything except Samba. If you try this way, my guess is it would look like this smb://hostname/printername/

There is no driver for the Lexmark multi-function printer I have on an XP system, so I have no hope of printing to it.

There are examples of using IPP. You mah need to find some of the information out from your windoze system; like port number. Continue takes you to the Make field. Pick HP from the drop down. Continue. Note, you could add your PPD file on this menu. Your choice.

Next menu is the model. I found the Deskjet F300 listed on my system, even though I don't own one. It listed the hpijs as the driver. Just what you want. When you find the printer in the looooong list, click on the F300, and click "Add Printer".

That will add the printer to your linux system. Try test page. If things are O.K. it will print. If not, you can go back through the settings you made, by going to the Printers tab, click your printer, and there is a Modify Printer option to change settings.

Once you get the feel of the gui, it is easy enough to add and modify printers. You also use this interface to manage print jobs.

Hope this helps. Let me know how it goes.

Hello Camorri. Sorry for taking so long to post. I tried your way but nothing has changed. I am back to square one. Something is definitely not right. It should be working fine.

I did find my printer make and model in the drop down list. Because I installed the .pdd file, I got two instances of my printer in the list.

The job queue in my xp box shows "page N/A".

I tried Samba,IPP,LPD and got the same results.

I even restarted cups daemon but nothing's changed.

Is it possible that cups file or config might be corrupted or something?

Let me know what you think. Thanks

-bhert

These are the transport mechanisms for the data. Samba client should work, and I know IPP will work, if either is set up correctly. LPD I have no experience with.

What "list" do you mean? You could have one printer for PPD ( postscript printer ) and one for the driver. Is this what you mean?

If this is the case, you should be able to send a pure postscript file to the PPD printer, and any other type of print job to the printer through the hpijs driver.

What I'm going to suggest you do to get this going; is move the printer for a short time to your linux machine. Get it to work locally. You just add the printer. The device will show up as a USB device. The driver is there. It should print Test Page without any problem. It is that easy. Then move it back to the windoze machine, and find out how to configure either samba ( not much to do in linux ) or IPP. IPP is just knowing the host and port information. Don't bother with the PPD file for now. If you need to, add it later. I can print any file through the driver, including post script. The PPD option is a fast way to get a printer going without a driver.

Are you sure the print file is getting to your windoze print queue? I'm not sure what "page N/A" means.

Hi. When I used localhost:631 to configure the printer, in the drop down list where I pick HP as make and then on to the model name, in the past, the name was already there for me to choose, which was HP-DeskJet_F300-hpijs.
when I installed the .ppd file, I now have 2 HP-DeskJet_F300-hpijs in the drop down list.
Seems to me that there was already a driver for the printer all along.

In the xp queue, if you were printing a 10 page document, it would show the name of the doc, page #, size, time of print. Well, when I sent the file from linux to the xp printer, everything was displayed in the queue except for part where the page # is supposed to say 1 but instead says N/A. I assumed that the printer didn't know how to print the page, that's why it would stall.

I plugged my printer into the linux box and the printer printed pics no problem.

I plugged it back to xp and spent nearly an hour trying to configure the printer to no avail. Still the same old crap about the file getting hung in the job queue.

I got remote file sharing working quite a while ago, now I can't even get the dang printer working right. How frustrating is this?

-bhert

I understand the frustration. It sounds like the printer will print when locally attached to your linux system. That is good. That means the driver, or PPD file is O.K.

I'm doing some guessing at this point. OpenSuse has a package manager. Have you verified you have a package of drivers installed? I know that isn't such an easy question to answer, since you need to know what the package is called. That varies from distro to distro. I guessing you are using the PPD file only, not the print driver. I did see what you said about the name showing up in cups, and then a second one showing up.

Last thing I can think of is delete the PPD files, and see if it works with just the driver, that is why I would like you to look for the driver package. This driver is supposed to work. HP's support for printers is as good as it gets in linux. So if it is broken for this printer, they should be notified.

Your assumption about what is hanging the printing is correct, juck in the print queue will hang it.

well, I looked in yast for the driver package and found one called hplip-hpijs installed.

The details of the driver I found in yast says:HPIJS is a Ghostscript printer driver for HP printers

I took out the .ppd file I installed earlier and tried to configure it again and the same thing happened whether I took out the .ppd file or not.

Doesn't make sense that the printer would work locally and not remotely.

The driver that is installed and the .ppd can't be broken if the printer worked locally can't it?

Please let me know what you think.


-bhert

Yes it should work on a remote server. The only difference is the URI.

I agree, the driver is OK and so is the PPD file.

What did you try as the URI?