On 03/26/2015 07:38 PM, Paul E Condon wrote:
I'm running Jessie, as close to plain vanilla as my hardware allows.
I have a HP Laserjet 5MP. This is an ancient device. It has built-in
firmware for Level 2 Postscript printing and a special socket for
Apple Localtalk connection, but no USB. It is a sturdy old beast and
was running nicely until quite recently. But in a special configuration
that needs to be understood in order to give help:
My main desktop computer on which I receive email, and create my own
documents has *only* USB. I bought a special cable that has a USB to
Centronics conversion dongle at one end. But I can't use it because the
socket for Centronics on the printer is in recessed place in the
printer where the dongle won't fit and I can't enlarge the place
without sawing away parts of the printer framework that are necessary
for the paper feed system to work. So, instead, I put into service an
old micro-mini Dell (now running Jessie) and put CUPS on it, and
configured it to be a print server. But all this was well before I had
any idea that there would ever be anything like Jessie in my
future. At first, after some fiddling, the print server worked under
Jessie, but now it has stopped working. The printer continues to
produce test pages when requesting them from the old Dell keyboard and
in self-test mode by pushing buttons on the printer itself, not by
typing at the computer keyboard.
After installing the most recent upgrades to Jessie on both computers
this morning, I tried to print a few pages from iceweasel and printing
worked. But I also want to be able to print from Emacs, which I use to
compose my emails, such as this one. Emacs told be that there was no
default printer even though I had just selected the printer on the old
Dell from a pick-list presented to be by the print user interface
presented to me by the Emacs user interface. I think I should configure
the Cups server on my desktop computer to indicate that that printer
over on the old Dell is the one for Emacs. But how do I do that?
I can't trust my own investigations to determine if there have been any
recent changes in the Jessie CUPS packages in the recent past. I know
there was a new version of CUPS at the time that Jessie entered pre-release
freeze, and I pretty sure my system was working then and not something
that I lost in my transition from Wheezy. And, of course, I'd like a
more foreword looking suggestion than to re-install Wheezy. I'd like this
fixed before Jessie release because I have a bad feeling that the longer
I wait the further from the main-stream I will be. I need, with my old
hardware, to be as close to the middle of the herd of users as I can be.
The print driver for the HPLj-5MP that I have been using in recent years
is the one with (recommended) in its listing in the pick-list of all HP
print drivers in the localhost:631 web site on both computers. Beyond that
I can't think of anything people might need to know about my set-up. I'd
be glad to answer any questions about things that I haven't realized might
be important.
Please help
The first thing to do is to set up printing from the machine you set up
as a print server. Can you do that? That is, can you bring up cups
from its keyboard and print a test page? This is more a proof a
connectivity than a test of the print server's cups setup, as the "print
server" can serve simply as a network node through which you connect
from other machines on your network to the printer.
Once you can do that, you should be able to print from whatever other
printer(s) permitted on your network by configuring it/them for that
print server's IP address. You first need to ensure you can ping the
print server from your other machine(s). Once you can do that, then set
up cups on the print client(s).
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