[cups] Setting up a brother that can do duplex, to make it do duplex?

Gene Heskett gheskett at shentel.net
Sat Oct 29 08:00:39 PDT 2016


On Saturday 29 October 2016 07:01:58 G.W. Haywood wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> On Sat, 29 Oct 2016, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > ... its a PITA to try and talk to Brother, they know zip ...
>
> Yeah, agreed.  I'm a Brother reseller.
>
> > On Sat, 29 Oct 2016, Jerry wrote:
> > > You did not mention what model printer you have.
> >
> > ... its a fully uptodate debian wheezy install ...
>
> Hmmm.  I think you'll find that a "fully uptodate debian wheezy" is
> running CUPS 1.5.3 which _can_ be made to do things but IMHO is not
> really fit for purpose.  You will find that the version which comes
> with Jessie (1.7.5) is much better, if still rather out of date.

Jessie is still haveing teething problems as I read on this list. Wheezy 
is dead stable and the most important  app I run, linuxcnc, has not been 
made to run on Jessie yet. The internal workings of the kernel have 
change so much in the last 2+ years, that the needed realtime patches 
will no longer apply. For full realtime, 3.4-9-rtai-686-pae is the 
latest kernel that is usable.  And while the pae is advertised in the 
uname report, pae doesn't work, put more that 2Gb of memory in the 
machine and its 500Gb into swap in 24 hours uptime.

The alternative for the missing realtime is a pci card, with an fpga 
programmed to do all that, about 90$ for the simplest one. So we a re 
stuck with older mobos that have a pci slot, and putting at least 
another 90$ card in the machine before we can spin a motor precisely and 
safely.

Technology moves on, and later today according to amazon, I will have a 
40$ raspberry pi 3 in my hot but ancient hands, which along with a 53$ 
I/O board, will be used to run the next machine I am rebuilding.  That 
was forced on me by simply not having enough room for a conventional old 
Dell, with one of those cards to run it.  The steel box that contains 
the power supplies and motor drivers for a 1500 lb metal lathe, has 
enough room on the inside of its locking door, to mount the pi, the 
interface, and some opto-isolation stuff I am using for 5 volt to 12 
volt level translators.

More fun will be hanging the monitor, and finding or building a place for 
the keyboard and mouse. Flying swarf, the name for the cuttings made, 
must be kept out of the keyboards else keys get jammed down, and since 
its metal, also conductive so must be kept out of the electronics, and 
mice don't appreciate a dirty surface either.

I only run a simulation of that control on this machine, but the newest 
working kernel even for that is 3.16.0-0.bpo.4-amd64.

So if if takes a newer cups than 1.5.3, I expect I'll have to build it 
insitu.

However, on much older cups, that was so NOT a problem. At one point, 
running a ubu 10.04 lts several years ago, I had 3 physical printers 
available, and 7 or 8 choices in the print dialog. And they all worked.  

So my question remains, why a 2 profile per printer limit?

Being forced to compose a profile to fit the job with "add printer" on a 
per job basis is a time killing PIMA.

So I will keep asking the question intermittently.

> On Sat, 29 Oct 2016, Jerry wrote:
> > > On Sat, 29 Oct 2016 08:26:07 +0200, Helge Blicke stated:
> > >
> > > ... The best way to get the suitable PPD is to copy it from a
> > > Windows 7 (or even, sigh, from an outdated XP) installation.
> >
> > The PPD can be copied from any version of Windows. I got mine from a
> > Windows 10 Pro.
>
> I've seen several references to the difficulties of getting PPDs from
> later versions of Windows drivers.  This is the first time I've seen
> anyone say it's easily done from any version.  If indeed that's what
> you said.  In the absence of what I'd call documentation one day I
> plan to find out what a PPD is, what it contains and why I would want
> one, but for now I'd be happy just to know how to grab one from a
> Windows installation.  Care to share?

A ppd is a text file, anyone can read it with less if they've sufficient 
permissions. Bringing in a windows ppd might require an EOL change, but 
I can't quickly think of anything else.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>



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