|
|
||
CUPS and Printing—Day 40© Copyright Darrell Anderson. I had some not-so-fun moments configuring my printer. I have an HP LaserJet 4200 with a duplexing tray. The printer connects to my parallel port. A wonderful tool. Of course, everything works fine in in NT4 and I expected likewise in Slackware. I began by using the KDE control center plug-in to configure the printer. Everything seemed to go well. No problem spitting out a test page. However, when I examined the printer specs, I noticed there was no option for 1200 dots per inch (dpi). Not good. As you might expect, I print mostly in economy mode, but I do like printing some things at the higher resolutions. According to the printer drive installed, I could go no higher than 600 dpi. I then opened Konqueror in browser mode and typed the URL http://localhost:631. I was asked for a name and password. When I was presented with the administration page, there were no icons for adding a new printer. Odd and confusing. Later I realized that because of my dial-up woes, I often surf with no images enabled. I therefore reenabled images and as you might expect, the CUPS web pages once again looked as expected. I think this is something the CUPS people should change. Although I did not try this, I wonder how those image buttons appear in a text-based browser such as Lynx. Regardless, these are supposed to be web pages serving as a configuration tool. There is no need to show off HTML skills. Just make everything a text link. I continued on my journey but could find no clues about changing the resolution. Then I was stumbling my way through the CUPS web site and ran across a blurb that got me thinking. In the CUPS world one is better off to print in straight PostScript rather than go through a double-conversion process with a printer driver. My printer is capable of printing in PostScript. Yet, no native PostScript driver was available in the list of printers. Eventually I found such a driver at the CUPS web site and coincidentally, the web page showed that the driver had been updated that day. I downloaded the driver and then I discovered another web site that explained the basic process of installing new printer drivers. This process was getting exhausting and testing my patience. I installed the driver to the appropriate directory but the driver was still unavailable in my printer selection list. I went back to the web site with the instructions and realized I had not restarted the CUPS service. Aargh! I did as instructed and now the PostScript driver appeared in my list. I selected the driver and then inspected the configuration specs. Yes, I could now print at 1200 dpi! Additionally, the PostScript driver supports my duplex tray. There remains one problem, however. Regardless of which program I use, the KDE print dialog box takes about 55 seconds to open. Likewise within the KDE control center. Something is not configured correctly. There is some kind of unnecessary polling going on. Using strace to open kprinter, I discovered that CUPS is reading my huge hosts file. I don’t know why. When I temporarily renamed the hosts file everything worked as expected. I did some surfing but came up empty. Thus, I can print, but not without a long wait. I hope the solution is simple, otherwise this is simply unacceptable. Finis. |
||