Tuesday, April 14, 2009

14 months from purchase to setup?

Not so long ago a thread came up on DF, dealing with printing. That reminded me.... I baught my printer in what, February of 2007 and it's just been gathering dust?

That's gotta be a new record: for either laziness or being to fsckin' busy lol.


The reason I bought it, I knew this model was usable with most OSes. Honestly, I _hate_ ink jet printers (and printers in general, but yeah... especially ink jets). Sadly, a decent PostScript printer is harder to find in this place then an affordable laser printer; having to use an inkjet makes me very happy that I rarely print anything.


Around OpenBSD 4.3 or so, I stripped off all printing related packages off my server: the shitmark hasn't worked in years. So I had to setup the format filtering magic anew: ghostscript (no_x11 flavour), hpijs, foomatic-filters, and foomatic-db-hpijs. Several years ago it was my intention to run a networked printer off the box, but the printer I had at the time more or less stopped functioning under FreeBSD+CUPS, so I haven't paid much attention since then. Most distributions use the Common Unix Print System (CUPS) these days; but I'm just old at heart, I like the Berkeley Line Printer Daemon (lpd). CUPS, only way I ever know wth is going on is going cross eyed with log files; with lpd, at least you know it's brainlessly simple to sort out.


My only complaint about the printer, 'lptest | lpr' resulted in 2 pages of ~60 lines before I decided to dequeue the 200 line job: and the some-bitch isn't smart enough to eject the darn 3rd sheet of paper ^_^. (whether this has to do with my PPD file or hpijs support for my printer is not interesting to me, lol). On top of that, the thing prints about as slow as I can write text by hand. I could just imagine if I fed tpsh's ~3000 lines of text though it, probably take a week and 50 sheets of paper.

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