Re: Desktop printing, a request for your experiences
Kevin Kinsey wrote: Dominic Marks wrote: List, Can anyone give me their experiences of desktop printing (OpenOffice/KDE/Gnome/Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, etc) recently? I haven't tried for a while but it was a pain to setup and maintain the last time I looked at it. If you are using this for real-work and you are getting good results please let me know what you are using (software and hardware ideally). The environment I would like to put this into is a family house, very small setup with 2 PCs and 2 printers. Currently both are Windows PCs but one is experiencing all of the classic issues with a multi-year Windows installation and since they are used exclusively for E-Mail and word processing I am interested in migrating one PC over to FreeBSD. .. If the solution was a Linux distro (box package, or otherwise) I would also be interested. ... I am not a subscriber so please keep me CC'ed in the discussion. Well, I would give you two items, perhaps you could help me as well. First, as soon as I get my FreeBSD box completely configured with all the tools I now have on my older Gentoo box, I will be retiring the Linux box, along with the nicely operating CUPS installation. That's soon but not now, I am too terribly into 3 other projects. The other point is, I didn't find (on Linux) a setting for the Ascii print util I like (a2ps, ajnd please don't try to sell me on yours, I like a2ps) to print the correct size for HP Deskjets to use. So, before I had FreeBSD back, I experimented, and found the ideal settings to get Gentoo's a2ps to print for me. Well, FreeBSD *does* have a a2ps-letterdj) to set a default a2ps for letterdj printers, but it seems to work very badly for me. I wanted to find anyone who runs an HP Inkjet printer (apparently either their DeskJet or OfficeJet) AND a2ps, so I could ask them to try my changes to /usr/local/etc/a2ps.cfg, to see if it works for their printer as well as it does for mine, so I could feel safe to inflict this on other folks. I got no replies. Would you possibly be able to do this? The HP InkJet printers have a slightly larger set of edge margins than a Laser printer has, and that causes a2ps to clip off the right hand edge of pages. I wasted a large number of pages, doing a binary search type algorithm to locate the best settings for my printer, an old 7130. You can still buy them on EBay, and as an honest recommendation, you would be really, really well served to buy one or two right away while they're still there, because HP got marketing-smart and cut the capabilities of their more recent AIO line of All-In-One type machines. My situation sounds somewhat similar to yours; wifey has a Winbox in the house, and I print through it to an HP 6100 Multifunction machine using apsfilter via SMB/samba. IIRC, apsfilter thinks the machine is an HP920 and uses the HP-provided 'hpijs' driver and GNU ghostscript. I sure can say, that (at least on FreeBSD) that I think that apsfilter was really the best well-supported printer support on FreeBSD, but I will be giving at least a real try on using CUPS, because it's better at networking. Right now, I print to my Linux box by saying: ssh (mylinuxhostname) lpr (file to print) and that works great, sending any possible file type that CUPS recognizes, specifically including all ps, pdf, and graphics types. I'm very good at getting ssh to work without passwords, that's obviously a requirement, otherwise you'd have to go thru all the password runaround. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Desktop printing, a request for your experiences
List, Can anyone give me their experiences of desktop printing (OpenOffice/KDE/Gnome/Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, etc) recently? I haven't tried for a while but it was a pain to setup and maintain the last time I looked at it. If you are using this for real-work and you are getting good results please let me know what you are using (software and hardware ideally). The environment I would like to put this into is a family house, very small setup with 2 PCs and 2 printers. Currently both are Windows PCs but one is experiencing all of the classic issues with a multi-year Windows installation and since they are used exclusively for E-Mail and word processing I am interested in migrating one PC over to FreeBSD. .. If the solution was a Linux distro (box package, or otherwise) I would also be interested. ... I am not a subscriber so please keep me CC'ed in the discussion. Cheers Dominic ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Desktop printing, a request for your experiences
On Mon, 26 Nov 2007 14:19:49 + Dominic Marks [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Can anyone give me their experiences of desktop printing (OpenOffice/KDE/Gnome/Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, etc) recently? I haven't tried for a while but it was a pain to setup and maintain the last time I looked at it. I'm using an HP 1320 (PostScript printer) + cups to do printing. It works like a charm when it is attached with a parallel cable; OTOH I was never able to print via USB to that beast (no joy with print/hplip etc...) from FreeBSD (even though it works under XP and on most Linux distros). Here, OpenOffice generates the best printing; but all Qt3-based printing shows bad kerning artifacts, the letters being not evenly spaced -- I don't know if it is fixed in Qt4. Printing from Firefox is okay for some sites that took corrective measures in their printing stylesheets to counteract FF css/printing bugs, on other sites it is often quite ugly (compared to MSIE, which does a much better job at printing whatever you throw at it). All in all, YMMV. It depends on your requirements. .. If the solution was a Linux distro (box package, or otherwise) I would also be interested. Well, disregarding the problem of not being able to talk to my HP-1320 via USB (instead of parallel), all other problems are not FreeBSD-specific; they show up in Linux distros as well. Regards, -cpghost. -- Cordula's Web. http://www.cordula.ws/ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Desktop printing, a request for your experiences
Quoting Dominic Marks [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Can anyone give me their experiences of desktop printing (OpenOffice/KDE/Gnome/Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, etc) recently? I haven't tried for a while but it was a pain to setup and maintain the last time I looked at it. If you are using this for real-work and you are getting good results please let me know what you are using (software and hardware ideally). The environment I would like to put this into is a family house, very small setup with 2 PCs and 2 printers. Currently both are Windows PCs but one is experiencing all of the classic issues with a multi-year Windows installation and since they are used exclusively for E-Mail and word processing I am interested in migrating one PC over to FreeBSD. .. If the solution was a Linux distro (box package, or otherwise) I would also be interested. ... I am not a subscriber so please keep me CC'ed in the discussion. At home I have one headless FreeBSD server, one FreeBSD desktop, one Windows desktop, and one or more laptops running either OS at various times. I also have an old cheap (non-PS) laser printer and a new-ish multifunction photo printer. The laser printer is connected to the FreeBSD server, which runs CUPS and Samba, among other things. The inkjet is connected to the Windows Desktop. Printing from FreeBSD (all stations also use CUPS) to the laser printer always works fine. Printing from Windows to the laster printer (talking to Samba with a CUPS backend) works fine most of the time. Occasionally graphics-intensive jobs will come out screwy, and Acrobat Reader doesn't always behave well for some reason (even though I'm using the Adobe Windows PS driver..). Printing from Windows to the inkjet always works well, and the vendor driver obviously supports all of the printer's features. Printing from FreeBSD to the inkjet (using an SMB backend to CUPS on the FreeBSD server) works well for standard documents and resolutions. If I need to print high-res or borderless photos I do it from Windows. (I also use the Windows station for scanning.) Much of the above could be different for different people using different printers. In my case attaching the dumb laser printer to a FreeBSD server makes it more usable, whereas attaching the inkjet printer to the FreeBSD server made it less so (vs Windows). The gutenprint drivers are catching up to the vendor ones but for this printer they aren't there yet. On the whole I'm quite happy with my CUPS server on FreeBSD, especially when printing from other CUPS-capable workstations (i.e. anything BUT Windows). Printers show up automatically and work the same from all stations with no need to distribute drivers, etc. JN ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Desktop printing, a request for your experiences
Dominic Marks wrote: List, Can anyone give me their experiences of desktop printing (OpenOffice/KDE/Gnome/Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, etc) recently? I'm using a HP LaserJet 6L with apsfilter. The driver I had to choose is ljet4. It was pretty easy to set up. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Desktop printing, a request for your experiences
Dominic Fandrey writes: Can anyone give me their experiences of desktop printing (OpenOffice/KDE/Gnome/Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, etc) recently? I'm using a HP LaserJet 6L with apsfilter. The driver I had to choose is ljet4. LaserJet 6mp; no add-ons. Works with OpenOffice. GIMP, and Mozilla-based stuff. (All under CUPS.) Robert Huff ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Desktop printing, a request for your experiences
Dominic Marks wrote: List, Can anyone give me their experiences of desktop printing (OpenOffice/KDE/Gnome/Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, etc) recently? I haven't tried for a while but it was a pain to setup and maintain the last time I looked at it. If you are using this for real-work and you are getting good results please let me know what you are using (software and hardware ideally). The environment I would like to put this into is a family house, very small setup with 2 PCs and 2 printers. Currently both are Windows PCs but one is experiencing all of the classic issues with a multi-year Windows installation and since they are used exclusively for E-Mail and word processing I am interested in migrating one PC over to FreeBSD. .. If the solution was a Linux distro (box package, or otherwise) I would also be interested. ... I am not a subscriber so please keep me CC'ed in the discussion. Cheers Dominic ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] My printing works perfect on all my machines (6 in total) and 2 printers. including printing from applications like Gimp. Printers are HP OfficeJet R60 and HP LaserJet 4L. I used both CUPS and LPD + apsfilter. I prefer LPD+apsfilter in particularly since LPD is included in base distribution. I have not played too much with LPRng+ifhp but I was able to set up basic printing in 30 minutes using that spooling system as well. I noticed that many applications have substandard built in ps filters. CUPS base filter cannot print dvi files :-(. I found a2ps useful for conversion to ps. Cheers, Predrag ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Desktop printing, a request for your experiences
Dominic Marks wrote: List, Can anyone give me their experiences of desktop printing (OpenOffice/KDE/Gnome/Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, etc) recently? I haven't tried for a while but it was a pain to setup and maintain the last time I looked at it. If you are using this for real-work and you are getting good results please let me know what you are using (software and hardware ideally). The environment I would like to put this into is a family house, very small setup with 2 PCs and 2 printers. Currently both are Windows PCs but one is experiencing all of the classic issues with a multi-year Windows installation and since they are used exclusively for E-Mail and word processing I am interested in migrating one PC over to FreeBSD. .. If the solution was a Linux distro (box package, or otherwise) I would also be interested. ... I am not a subscriber so please keep me CC'ed in the discussion. My situation sounds somewhat similar to yours; wifey has a Winbox in the house, and I print through it to an HP 6100 Multifunction machine using apsfilter via SMB/samba. IIRC, apsfilter thinks the machine is an HP920 and uses the HP-provided 'hpijs' driver and GNU ghostscript. I've had trouble with later versions of Abiword and this setup; possibly also some issues with Acrobat Reader, as well. I've not taken time to work on this for a while, as I usually print from web apps only --- printing is great from Mozilla et al. Kevin D. Kinsey -- Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. -- George Bernard Shaw ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
