iB::Topic::Printing to a Windows Printer

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Topic: Printing to a Windows Printer, I would think this to be a common prob

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chipandrews Offline

Group: Members
Posts: 3
Joined: Dec. 2004

Posted: Dec. 03 2004,21:37

First off - I love DSL and I want to see it recommended for all those poor relatives with 5 year old machines and no clue. That said, a big sticking point in still the difficulty in printing from DSL to a Windows-connected printer. I realize I can download CUPS and a myriad of other things (including drivers) and eventually get things working but who's got time to do that on every install?

Isn't there a way to include some base CUPS functionality to allow most users to easily connect to a Windows-connected printer from DSL? Even it only had a core set of HP, Epson, and other drivers (to keep the storage requirements low) that cover about 80% of the home printers out there it would be awesome! Even if it had to go out to the web (like Firefox used to) to get the drivers etc, I'd be satisfied.

Chip

cbagger01

Group: Members
Posts: 4264
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: Dec. 04 2004,03:50

There is some basic printing functionality in DSL.

It's called apsfilter.

Anything more than that is unlikely to fit on a 50MB business card-sized livecd without removing other important programs or hardware support.

If you don't want to download the CUPS files a bunch of times, you can install it once and then save all of the CUPS-related Debian package files out to a CD-R disk or a USB drive.

The deb files will be stored in your /var/cache/apt/archives/ directory after installation is finished.

You will need the dsl-dpkg extension in order to do this, but restoration should be as simple as:

1) use the mkmydsl script to make a custom ISO file which contains the dsl-dpkg.dsl extension that is downloaded from the myDSL repository. Also include your *.deb files for CUPS into this iso.

2) Burn the ISO to a CD-R disk.

3) USe your new custom DSL disk to install it to a new computer and then open an xterm and type:

cd /cdrom
sudo dpkg -i *.deb
exit

and you will have CUPS installed in your new system without needed to re-download anything.

Hope this helps.

chipandrews
Unregistered

Posted: Dec. 04 2004,20:20

Cool - thanks for the info. I was finally able to get it work by installing Webmin and using the Webmin printer administration module which supports printing to a Windows-connected printer.