to set your paper size to A4 first (The
paper size is found under the "General"
heading).
to
print your test page. Your test page should look like this.Monday, October 30, 2000 01:07:05 AM
This document aims to teach the newbie how to achieve printing in Linux. Windows users who have switched to Linux should find this document helpful as this document is written by a Windows user who has switched to Linux. This document is not meant to be comprehensive. A more comprehensive document can be found at linuxprinting.org. This document seeks to help beginners get that first printed page in Linux fast.
Around a year ago, I bought an Epson Stylus Photo 700 printer. I took the printer home, unpacked and connected it directly to a parallel port on the back of my PC. Following that, Win98 was booted. The driver which came with the printer was installed. Following that, a first test page was printed successfully. No sweat.
A year later, Linux was my choice OS because Win98 kept crashing. I needed to reboot the PC after a few hours. When I wanted to save a document in Word97, I realized I couldn't -- the system had crashed. I rebooted the system and had to redo the changes and save them again.
Red Hat Linux 6.2 was the distribution I chose. No particular reasons. It was just because I could find the books for it much more easily than for other distributions in the libraries.
I read in the books that there was a tool called "printtool" that could help to setup my Epson printer. I started that tool. The filter for my printer was not found. I could have used the 'Stylus Color' filter, but I wanted to achieve the full capabilities of my printer as I have achieved in Windows.
Since "printtool" could not help me to setup my printer, I needed another program that could achieve this. I chose CUPS. It is said to be an emerging technology. I wanted to try it out.
The RPM package of CUPS 1.1.4 was downloaded. "lpr" had to be removed first before installing CUPS. As root, I typed:
rpm -e lpr --nodeps
to remove lpr.
As root again, CUPS was installed with this command:
rpm -Uvh cups-1.1.4-linux-2.2.14-intel.rpm
After installing CUPS, I checked what drivers came with it. To do this, I read the documentation. Alas! The driver for my printer is not found! After much searching on the net, I found a package called Gimp-Print that contained a number of free CUPS drivers. I installed the CUPS drivers.
With CUPS and the drivers installed, CUPS has to be restarted with this command:
/etc/init.d/cups restart
The printer can now be added. There are two ways to go about adding a printer with CUPS. The first way is to type commands on the command-line. The second and easier way is to point-and-click the way through a web interface. I chose the latter.
Basically, "http://localhost:631/admin" is typed as the URL in a browser. A pop-up window will request for the User ID and password. For User ID, "root" should be typed. The password asked is the root's password. Next, "Add Printer" was clicked. From there, everything is straightforward.
Click here to find out how to add a printer from the command line.
Now, print a test page to check if your printer can print correctly.
to set your paper size to A4 first (The
paper size is found under the "General"
heading). to
print your test page. Your test page should look like this.Gimp-Print is a 3-in-1 package. It consists of three components. They are the print facility for the Gimp (a graphics manipulation program), a ghostscript driver called stp and CUPS drivers. What I dislike about Gimp-Print is that instead of separating the three components into their individual packages, the developer chose to pack everything together. Thus, the package size and download time is increased. What I don't need (the first two components, because I don't do much graphics work and I don't need stp to support my printer) are also downloaded. I really hope the developers will allow the downloading of the separate components when I next visit their web site.
I have packaged ONLY the CUPS drivers and filters from Gimp-Print into an RPM package called fcpd. You may want to download this instead of Gimp-Print. It's only one third the size of Gimp-Print!!!
fcpd is version 1.0.0, release 1 right now. Two printer tools are included. One of them is "escputil". It allows Epson printer owners to align and clean their printer heads and much more. I'm sure fcpd works (just make sure you are using CUPS 1.1.4 or higher). It worked for me. Please try this out. If it doesn't work, you can always uninstall it and send me an email stating your problem(s).
Click here to see if your printer is supported by fcpd.
If you have any problems, you can always feel free to drop me an email:
