Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 13:38:51 -0400 From: "Henke, Adrian" <Adrian.Henke@vh1.com> To: "'freebsd-questions@freebsd.org'" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: a question regarding printer configuration Message-ID: <17021EFBA34CD211BC6400A0C9C749059C23CD@vh1ny2.viacom.com>
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My apologies for the lengthy explanation. Please consider these issues, as I tried to be thorough! Unfortunately, no matter how hard I try to follow the instructions listed in the FreeBSD handbook (as well as numerous other resources), I can't seem to get my Epson Action Laser 1400 parallel printer working properly. But I refuse to give up! I understand that my issues may be difficult to consider without actually looking at my particular machine; nonetheless, I hope that this is not an inappropriate forum to ask for technical advice. First, let's say that I configured all of the settings as stated in the tutorial - the shell script in printcap, enabling ghostscript, etc. Ghostscript is indeed installed, and doesn't seem to be the source of trouble (at least not that I can tell). As an aside, it would make sense for me to ask a question here which plagues me about scripts generally: To I need to chmod 555 each script (not necessarily in printcap, but generally) in order to make it executable? The handbook seems to imply this in Chapter 7 (Printing), but I haven't seen reference to it in any other documentation. Additionally, regardless of the script I place in say, lpfilter or hpif, I can't seem to get the "staircase effect" to cease and create a full page of text when I run lptest > /dev/lpt0. I also tried installing and making executable the lpfilter script from the cdrom (as described in Ch. 16 of The Complete FreeBSD), which worked OK until I tried to configure the spooler. This puzzles me because it seems that the script itself is intended for PostScript printers, and I do not believe that mine provides native support of that (no mention of it in the printer's documentation)! However the main problem, I believe, lies within the spooler. Regardless of whether or not there is a print job in the queue, I get two warning/error messages which say "Warning: lp is down: printing disabled" and "Warning: no daemon present" when I run lpq. In addition, the spooling error log file consistently reads something to the effect of "could not execv" followed by what I think is the directory of the lp daemon. Could I have corrupted the actual binary? The Epson Action Laser 1400's documentation claims that HP LaserJet 4P drivers should work with it if Epson-specific drivers are unavailable. Therefore I enabled the LaserJet4 drivers in the Ghostscript configuration. However when I tried to print out a relatively elaborate piece of text (like an html page from the FreeBSD handbook from within KDE), I seem to have printed a Qt format header with several pages of legible but nonsensical text following. Of course, this was before I started experiencing the error messages mentioned above. Now I simply can't print anything at all unless its directly from lptest > /dev/lpt0. Any relation there? Issuing the lptest 20 5 | lpr command produces no results, which seems to coincide with my mysterious missing daemon. If there is ANYTHING that you might be able to tell me regarding this main issue or any of the more peripheral issues I mentioned, I would undoubtedly be better off than I am right now! Any insights would be well recieved, just don't tell me to forget it and reinstall Windows!!! :) Thanks for your patience. Sincerely, Adrian Henke To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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