no printer drivers in kde
 

recently installed 12.0 and not many problems. when i went to hook up my okidata ml391turbo 24 pin impact printer(old, i know, but a great machine),the kde print manager couldn't find any models or drivers(as in none for any printer whatsoever)-where should these drivers be installed and are they on the slack disk(purchased from slackstore as a 6 disk cd). i had this thing running under kde and slack 9.1 w/a2.4* kernel. any thoughts or info appreciated. thanx.

creak....groan.....squeak (brain trying to remember some details)

Don't you have to install CUPS and printer driver packages separately?

On this system (PCLOS), there are Okidata drivers for "24-pin", + several mlXXX models. (In addition to CUPS, I have installed the Gutenprint and HPLIP packages.)
There is hope....

A stock full install of Slackware 12 has cups. Did you set cups to start at boot-up?

If you have CUPS starting at boot-up, you can go to http://localhost:631 in your favourite browser and set up your printer from there (click "Add Printer" I think).

cups is on there and i tried that but the only drivers they give are a generic 24 pin and some other nonuseful models. cups offers the option of providing your own ppd. the ibm omni driver(last release, 2004)will let you generate a ppd for the omni driver to use. when i generated the file, i got a lot of error messages during 'setup', but i got a ppd for it-doesn't seem to work,or the omni driver itself isn't compiled properly or not in the right place-all this is also tied in with ghostscript(which is several versions ahead of the 2004 omni). the error messages have me wondering if the 2.6 kernel has things askew(previously i got things going under 2.4 and gs 7something). the 9.1 kde had the driver listed in their print manager so i thought to try it, but when i opened it up i got a message-'can't locate drivers' for anything, leaving me to believe they didn't get installed or are not linked properly. if i can find them, maybe i can put them where they will work. thanx again for your thoughts.

Have you checked http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/OpenPrinting for a suitable setup?