Some more specific info will help us help you better. Yes, you're absolutely right - printing is a maze of twisty passages! There are a few tools which will help lay down a working config, if you've got a common, supported printer. Congratulations on getting ascii data successfully piped out the right port to the printer. Next step is to set up a spooler, and then arrange for protocol translation, so that you can print postscript, which most of the fancier programs (gimp, netscape, staroffice) like to output. Make sure you have one of the spoolers installed, either lprold, which is the SuSE default, or lprng, which is also on the CD. Install ghostscript. There are several variants, depending on your display. All of the variants will print, they only vary in whether you want to preview using native VGA tools, or X based tools. If you can't decide, there's always gs_both. (There are several related packages, fonts, etc. In yast, select your gs_ package, press f5, then select 'auto'. It'll grab the rest for you.) I strongly recommend installing apsfilter. This is the 'glue' that pulls it all together. It builds an extremely complicated printcap, and I pull my hair out every time I try to understand it, but it works! Basically, it lets you send just about anything to the printer, and it will figure out what format the file is in, and invoke the proper translator for you. It supports text, postscript, DVI, LaTEX, even jpeg and gif files! So once you've brought up yast to install all these packages (I prefer yast1), Go to System sdministration ->Integrate hardware into system -> Configure printers. This will step you thru the configuration of apsfilter. If your printer is one of those supported, it'll do all the work for you! On Thu, 5 Apr 2001, otto porter wrote:
I have spent the last 3 days trying to get 7.1 to print. In that time I have read both Printing-howto and PrintUsage-Howto, all that I can find in the Suse documents, and the deja linux archives and many other web resources, including the BSD handbook.
It is obvious from the posts I read in the archives that my problems are not unique.
At first I was trying to print to a netware printer using the ncp package which works fine in connecting to my netware server.
I gave that up and connected a printer locally to lpt1. I can print text to this printer from the command line: cat myfile.txt > /dev/lp0 so I know that the printer is connected and working.
I have followed the documentation on setting up a queue and filters in both yast and lprsetup/aspfilter and none of this stuff works. From message archives that I have read, I am convinced that this is a black art. I am an experienced network admin and with accurate documentation and newsgroup/list archives I can handle just about anything. But the resources available for linux printing seem woefully inadequate.
I sure would appreciate any pointers to resources I have missed or anything else that might get me going.
thanks, Otto Porter
-- Rick Green "I have the heart of a little child, and the brain of a genius. ... and I keep them in a jar under my bed"