[cups.general] printing to windows printer

[Till Kamppeter]

tadek at telus.net wrote:
> Till,
> 
> Thank you. It now works.  All installed packages were up-to-date, but I missed installation of some: nss_wins, samba-swat,samba-winbind.
> (I don't know which one resolved the problem. Which one do you think?)
> 

For sure not samba-swat, as this is simply a web administration 
interface for Samba, so one of the other two has resolved it. Thanks for 
this hint, I will make printerdrake install these two automatically.

> After installing them printer was not printing properly (test page was scrambled), but I quickly fixed it by changing the hp driver from
> HP DeskJet 2000 series-CUPS+Gimp-Print v4.2.7 (en) to
> HP LaserJet 2100 Series (en).
> 

Did printerdrake automatically choose the wrong PPD or did you manually 
choose the wrong PPD?

If your LaserJet 2100 is on the parallel port, please post the output of

cat /proc/sys/dev/parport/parport?/autoprobe*

If it is on USB, run

getusbprinterid /dev/usb/lp0
getusbprinterid /dev/usb/lp1
....

With this info auto-assigning of PPDs/drivers to printers gets much more 
reliable.

> One observation and one question:
> 
> When I used ESP CUPS (localhost:631) configuration tool, and step through modifying added printer, somehow it modifies URI (user/password disappears) and to make printer again I have to delete printer and add it again entering proper URI.

This seems to be a problem (bug?) of the web interface of CUPS. Use 
printerdrake or the KDE Printing Manager for now.

> 
> Now question: Kurt Pfeifle's HOWTO (Troubleshooting-CUPS...) in section 'Other Items to Check'is talking about utility cups-config.  It would be very useful to have during my struggle.  Why is it missing from Mandrake package installer?  (I guess I could get it from cups.org, but...)
> 

Install the libcups-devel package ("urpmi libcups-devel"). This package 
contains cups-config. I considered it for a development tool as it 
provides the paths needed for compiling programs using libcups. Is it 
the only way to easily get info about the CUPS version? If so, I could 
move it to the cups-common package.

    Till