# printing to a windows printer via smb/cups!

## ferg

Hi all,

well I'm completely stumped!!

I've been making the transition from Debian to Gentoo over the last month or two.  So far I have everything working teh way I like it except one small matter!  I cannot for the life of me get Cups to print to a windows printer.

I had this setup working perfectly under Debian.  Using Qtcups I was able to print perfectly to the Epson 640 on the windows 2000 machine.

Now using Gentoo I am stuck.  I initially just copied my cups and samba files across from the Debian partition, and after adding the users and synchronising passwords using smbpasswd, I tried to get things working.  Now file sharing from the windows machine works perfectly as before.  However CUPS coudl not access the windows printer.  So I browsed the forums and documentation and found quite a few install guides.  I followed these, but still no printing!!

At the moment I can print to this machine by doing the following 

1, I've a 2nd espon printer setup using Cups, which prints to a file.

2, using the following command I then print the file to the windows printer,    cat ./temp/printfile.prn | smbclient //fluffy/epson password -c "print -"

This works fine!!

Now why on earth can cups not do this?

Note fluffy is the windows machine, and epson is the printer.

My printer.conf is:-

# Printer configuration file for CUPS v1.1.14

# Written by cupsd on Mon Jan 13 11:55:27 2003

<DefaultPrinter epson>

Location fluffy

DeviceURI smb://user:password@fluffy/epson

State Idle

Accepting Yes

JobSheets none none

QuotaPeriod 0

PageLimit 0

KLimit 0

</Printer>

<Printer File>

Location scotgate2

DeviceURI file:/home/chris/temp/printfile.prn

State Idle

Accepting Yes

JobSheets none none

QuotaPeriod 0

PageLimit 0

KLimit 0

</Printer>

If anybody requires any more information, please tell me!

Cheers

Chris

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## cyfred

Did you follow the gentoo printing howto through?

[url] http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/printing-howto.xml [/url]

Which foomatic-configure command did you use? If the printer you are trying to print too has more than one listed driver try using that different driver/s and see if that helps?

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## ferg

Hi,

Thanks fro replying.  Yes I followed those instructions to get it going!

However, since I posted, I've been playing further with my setup.  I noticed that somebody had posted that they could print from apps, but not a test page using the web cups interface!

Well I tried this and nothing happened.  Then I realised that a job was blocking teh queue.  So I deleted all jobs, then tried lpr textfile.txt.  This printed fine!!

So I tried to print from Mozilla.  Fine!!!

However I stil cannot print a test page from the Cups web interface!! Weird!!

Anyway at least i can print!!!!

One thing though, under Debian with the gimp-print-drivers I could select just one driver, and then use qrcups to adjust teh quality settings etc...   However under Gentoo the advanced tab option under qtcups-properties, is greyed out.  

Do I have to setup different drivers, and then configure them, to use different quality settings?

I'll keep playing and see if I can figure this out, but any advice would be msot welcome!!

Cheers

Ferg

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## cyfred

 *Quote:*   

> One thing though, under Debian with the gimp-print-drivers I could select just one driver, and then use qrcups to adjust teh quality settings etc... However under Gentoo the advanced tab option under qtcups-properties, is greyed out.

 

Do you have QT installed? 

Cups can rely fairly heavily on qt sometimes, but it is not a dependency, so maybe try an emerge qt and then rebuild cups.

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## ferg

Well QT is installed.  QTcups would not run without this.

I'll try again though and re emerge qt and emerge cups again!

This problem is well weird though! I just do not understand why it is not working!!!!

Cheers

Ferg

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## lukin

I was propably having the same problem as you were - but I finally got it solved!

There seems to be a bug or something in the Cups versions 1.1.16 and 1.1.18 that prevents printing to win2000/xp printers.

It magically started working for me after I emerged Cups 1.1.15!

Maybe you will want to try this?

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## rizzo

Hmm I'm having problems printint to my Win2000 printer.  I'm downgrading back to CUPS 1.1.15.  Is this problem documented somewhere?  Is there a bug report or solution from the CUPS team?

Basically my printer shows up normal in CUPS, but when I print nothing comes out, but no problem is reported from CUPS either.

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## rizzo

Well I downgraded and get the same behavior.  Then I thought perhaps I need to recompiled gimp-print-cups.  However doing this forces me to upgrade cups back to 1.1.18-r4.

I'd really like to know what is up with printing to windows 2000.

update: I noticed that gimp-print-cups-4.3.8-r1 is the only gimp-print-cups ebuild that requires cups 1.1.18.  The others don't specify a version.  I'll drop downgrading gimp-print-cups as well.

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## rizzo

Well I downgraded to gimp-print-cups 4.3.8 with cups 1.1.15-r2.  Now when I try to print (test page) it says that the jobs were cancelled immediately.

If anyone helps me get this working, I'll buy dinner.  Assuming you like dinner salads and water.

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## n0n

 *rizzo wrote:*   

> If anyone helps me get this working, I'll buy dinner.  Assuming you like dinner salads and water.

 

Mmmm, salad.  I don't suppose the CUPS logs say anything?

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## rizzo

```
I [17/Feb/2003:19:25:59 -0600] Job 9 queued on 'CanonBJC' by ''.

E [17/Feb/2003:19:25:59 -0600] Unable to convert file 0 to printable format for job 9!

```

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## edoloughlin

 *rizzo wrote:*   

> 
> 
> ```
> I [17/Feb/2003:19:25:59 -0600] Job 9 queued on 'CanonBJC' by ''.
> 
> ...

 

I'm seeing something similar but the error message is different. Cups can't seem to find ghostscript:

```
D [18/Feb/2003:11:16:26 +0000] Job 4 hold_until = 0

D [18/Feb/2003:11:16:26 +0000] StartJob(4, 0x809cea8)

D [18/Feb/2003:11:16:26 +0000] StartJob() id = 4, file = 0/1

E [18/Feb/2003:11:16:26 +0000] Unable to convert file 0 to printable format for job 4!

I [18/Feb/2003:11:16:26 +0000] Hint: Do you have ESP Ghostscript installed?

D [18/Feb/2003:11:16:26 +0000] CancelJob: id = 4

d [18/Feb/2003:11:16:26 +0000] add_job_state_reasons(0x2ad86220[5], 4)

D [18/Feb/2003:11:16:26 +0000] ProcessIPPRequest: 5 status_code=0

d [18/Feb/2003:11:16:26 +0000] WriteClient: Removing fd 5 from OutputSet...

d [18/Feb/2003:11:16:26 +0000] ReadClient() 5, used=0

D [18/Feb/2003:11:16:26 +0000] CloseClient() 5

d [18/Feb/2003:11:16:26 +0000] CloseClient: Removing fd 5 from InputSet and OutputSet...

```

Note the Hint: Do you have ESP Ghostscript installed?

I had a look around /etc/cups but can't find any reference to paths. ESP Ghostscript 7.05.5 is installed, with CUPS 1.1.18-r2.

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## rizzo

Yeah I have ghostscript 7.05.5-r2 installed, but I had to  drop down  to a lower version of cups and gimp-print-cups to get it work in Win2000.  Although it doesn't really work so what do I know.

I just noticed that when I try to print a test page from the cups page it says "Job XX queued on CanonBJC by ''."  However when i try to print a normal page from mozilla it says "Job XX queued on CanonBJC by 'rizzo'.", with the username this time.  Although it doesn't matter since both fail with that "Unable to convert" error.

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## rizzo

FYI I'm using (or trying to) the gimp-print-ijs driver for my Canon BJC-3000 printer.

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## edoloughlin

 *rizzo wrote:*   

> ..  Although it doesn't matter since both fail with that "Unable to convert" error.

 

Someone said in another thread (lost the link) that you need to re-emerge ghostscript after emerging CUPS. I tried this but it didn't fix anthing.

I did luck out, though. I messed around and unmerged CUPS while trying out APSFILTER. However, it seems that Samba has a dependency on CUPS, which meant I had to emerge it again.

This seemed to force KDE to update its printer database and I found a new driver for my printer model that didn't require downgrading the postscript to level 1 or 2. Perhaps this is what was causing the problem.

I can now print from KDE and from non-kde progs using the kprinter command.

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## rizzo

Progress :p  Based on your advice I re-installed ghostscript 7.05.5-r2.  I then restarted cups and this is what I get when i try to print a webpage from moz:

```
I [18/Feb/2003:10:09:58 -0600] Job 14 queued on 'CanonBJC' by 'rizzo'.

I [18/Feb/2003:10:09:58 -0600] Started filter /usr/lib/cups/filter/pstops (PID 31472) for job 14.

I [18/Feb/2003:10:09:58 -0600] Started filter /usr/lib/cups/filter/cupsomatic (PID 31473) for job 14.

I [18/Feb/2003:10:09:59 -0600] Started backend /usr/lib/cups/backend/smb (PID 31474) for job 14.

E [18/Feb/2003:10:10:00 -0600] PID 31473 stopped with status 32!

```

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