cups, irix and printcapGui
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cups, irix and printcapGui
Hey,
I want to print on matrix printers like impact and inkjet ones from IRIX. They are obviously non-postrstript.
I hoped I could use impressario? after all doesn't it have a postsript interpreter?
Anyway I tried to install CUPS, ghostview, gimp-print (and all the hell of dependencies) from freezare.sgi.
Is this the only option I have ,
I want to print on a epson stylus as a first task (6 ink)
It seems I was able to set up all so that I can print a test page (although it seems it uses only 4 inks, not 6) But I cannot print from any other application. Like imageworks or NEdit.
one of the problems seeems to be the PrintcapGUI, which is set to be /usr/bin/glpoptions frop ESP Print Pro
(the gui to set extra printer options) which I don't have it seems.
Any solutions ?
anyway even without setting any options, the spooling seems to fail since I see no job in the CUPs queue (when printing from an application which has a printer chooser, like NEdit)
printing form other apps like netscape and PDFView which have only LP options will be the next task.
I want to print on matrix printers like impact and inkjet ones from IRIX. They are obviously non-postrstript.
I hoped I could use impressario? after all doesn't it have a postsript interpreter?
Anyway I tried to install CUPS, ghostview, gimp-print (and all the hell of dependencies) from freezare.sgi.
Is this the only option I have ,
I want to print on a epson stylus as a first task (6 ink)
It seems I was able to set up all so that I can print a test page (although it seems it uses only 4 inks, not 6) But I cannot print from any other application. Like imageworks or NEdit.
one of the problems seeems to be the PrintcapGUI, which is set to be /usr/bin/glpoptions frop ESP Print Pro
(the gui to set extra printer options) which I don't have it seems.
Any solutions ?
anyway even without setting any options, the spooling seems to fail since I see no job in the CUPs queue (when printing from an application which has a printer chooser, like NEdit)
printing form other apps like netscape and PDFView which have only LP options will be the next task.
I am no guru here, but I recall having a problem where parts of my print system where traditional IRIX bsd printing system components (i.e. the lp, lpc, lpq, etc. binaries) were mixed with the CUPS components of the same names (i.e. lp was the CUPS lp, and lpq was the IRIX version). You might want to remove any IRIX printing system stuff, remove the CUPS stuff, and reinstall just the CUPS stuff.
As for printing from applications, when I print from applications, I just have the application print to the "lp" command. Since CUPS sets the default printer (like a regular BSD printing system would), just using "lp" as the print command from, say, Mozilla, works for me.
I hope this is sort of helpful.
Impressario is not likely to be overly useful to you unless you have a specifically supported printer.
As for printing from applications, when I print from applications, I just have the application print to the "lp" command. Since CUPS sets the default printer (like a regular BSD printing system would), just using "lp" as the print command from, say, Mozilla, works for me.
I hope this is sort of helpful.
Impressario is not likely to be overly useful to you unless you have a specifically supported printer.
I once had freeware CUPS working pretty well and used xpp as the GUI. That was awhile ago (circa. 6.5.17) I haven't had any luck since. I wish someone would be put together a brief CUPS "how to", since I have an HP DeskJet693C at home that only prints gibberish now.
What I did was:
What I did was:
Code: Select all
- move the IRIX printing files
mv /usr/bin/lp /usr/bin/lp.old
mv /usr/bin/lpstat /usr/bin/lpstat.old
- link the CUPS printing files
ln -s /usr/freeware/bin/lp /usr/bin/lp
ln -s /usr/freeware/bin/lpstat /usr/bin/lpstat
- book mark CUPS printing menu: http://localhost:631/
squeen wrote:I once had freeware CUPS working pretty well and used xpp as the GUI. That was awhile ago (circa. 6.5.17) I haven't had any luck since. I wish someone would be put together a brief CUPS "how to", since I have an HP DeskJet693C at home that only prints gibberish now.
For the record, I am using 6.5.22 and CUPS works fine for my Octane.
Wierd thing was, my printer is not suppported by free CUPS. So I had to go download the printer drive package for "professional CUPS". Once downloaded, though, I was able to use the pay-for driver with the freeware cups software. I would have thought ESP would have stopped people from doing that.
hmm, yes, removing the old lp, lpr etc... and then symlinking the cups ones to the old place (so some stubborn apps find them anyway) solved most of the tricks.
I can now print from most apps (except adobe acrobat reader)..but still I want to solve this problem of the option settings. Always opening a browser is a pain.. also if there are jobs in action cps acts really badly. Having a gui panel for the printer option would be good.
Someone has the EPS glpoption executable around? or a good replacement?
the other problem is that the colors and saturations are quite poor from default, I tried playing with the options a bit but still get quite rough results, at least compared with standard settings under mac and windows.
I can now print from most apps (except adobe acrobat reader)..but still I want to solve this problem of the option settings. Always opening a browser is a pain.. also if there are jobs in action cps acts really badly. Having a gui panel for the printer option would be good.
Someone has the EPS glpoption executable around? or a good replacement?
the other problem is that the colors and saturations are quite poor from default, I tried playing with the options a bit but still get quite rough results, at least compared with standard settings under mac and windows.
gandalf wrote:Having a gui panel for the printer option would be good.
We'll there is the web interface of port 631
http://localhost:631/
Also, xpp from freeware does a pretty good job of glp replacement.
Just put xpp in instead of lp or glp in the print command box.
My sym link hack doesn't work too well for me, I was hoping sone else would speak up and tell me a better way of configuring CUPS.
squeen wrote:I once had freeware CUPS working pretty well and used xpp as the GUI.
[snip]
What I did was:Code: Select all
- move the IRIX printing files
mv /usr/bin/lp /usr/bin/lp.old
mv /usr/bin/lpstat /usr/bin/lpstat.old
- link the CUPS printing files
ln -s /usr/freeware/bin/lp /usr/bin/lp
ln -s /usr/freeware/bin/lpstat /usr/bin/lpstat
- book mark CUPS printing menu: http://localhost:631/
Well, there is a faster but unsupported way to accomplish the task. Look under /usr/freeware/etc/cups, and you will find the install-cups utility (and its counterpart, uninstall-cups).
The files have always been there since I packaged the first version of CUPS for SGI freeware, but for various reasons (not least: creating problems to the IRIX engineers when preparing the official IRIX packages) the previous freeware maintainer chose to not mention the two files in the release notes, and it's still so.
CUPS has some part of the code that is included in when it's compiled on SGI, which enables an almost smooth integration with the desktop. I had to reverse engineer the way the desktop interacts with the printers via Impressario, and implement the simulation under CUPS. For this reason, it is important that the CUPS binaries are encountered before the standard IRIX ones in the search path. install-cups does exactly this: moves out the standard IRIX binaries, and put symbolic links in place that point to the CUPS binaries. It also disables the standard lpsched server, and enables the CUPS one. uninstall-cups reverses obviously the changes, and SHOULD be used whenever an update of CUPS or IRIX is to be undertaken, because especially in the case of IRIX packages one cannot know in advance if the printing binaries will be replaced or not. After the update, just reinstall the CUPS swapover with install-cups, and you are done.
The CUPS desktop integration is not complete, nor perfect however. For example, I know that printer groups are not displayed, because it would need a trick in the lpstat command that the CUPS maintainer did not want to integrate. However, I bet that part of my work in CUPS may have migrated in ESP (and I'm fine with this), so eventually ESP could offer a better integration than CUPS, apart from featuring an integrated GUI for setting the printer options.
Hope it helps,
A.S.
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Now, a neko_cups would be awesome... 

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squeen wrote:Sure does. Thanks!
Any chance we could get you to do a neko_cups package?
Well, eventually later on it could be a possibility. CUPS 1.1.21 was already on my TODO list (for SGI freeware, tho), but I've put it on hold since I've read that 1.1.22 will follow shortly due to some memory leaks that afflict CUPS 1.1.21. The problem with CUPS and FLTK is that they go through a lengthy process before a version is officially delivered (lot of release candidates), which is good; unfortunately, given the timing of SGI freeware, it also means that what you find on the web site is not always the latest version. But quite surely, it's a version that is considered stable enough.
A.S.
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