Friday, November 19, 2004

Linux Printing, Again

I've ranted in the past about the sorry state of Linux printing. Sure, if I plug an HP DeskJet into a parallel port, setting up printing is going to be pretty easy. But USB printers seem to give difficulties. I finally got my Samsung ML-1710 working on Bagend but had to resort to the same hack I used last time. Namely, using a the ppd file (driver) for the older ML-1210.

This is especially annoying since YaST auto-detected the printer as an ML-1710 and set it up using the ML-1710 ppd file. When testing the connection to the printer, everything came up ok. But trying to actually get any output was an exercise in frustration. Doing a tail -f /var/log/cups/error_log wasn't illuminating, either.

I tried using the setup program downloaded from Samsung's website and struck out with that as well. Finally, I decided to try setting it up in YaST and manually selecting the ML-1210 ppd, and it worked.

Grrrr.

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