:~>Does NOT look encouraging. Even the PCL emulation appears to be in
:~>software and it won't print plain text files tossed at it either. The
:~>driver is proprietary and no projects seem to be aimed at figuring it
:~>out, perhaps because it isn't terribly popular.
I hate to see this kind of beasts. Pfui.
Complain to Canon. It will not help, but it might make you feel better and
it might make them (re)think about supporting Linux...
:~>Canon might write a linux driver for it. Til then, using SAMBA and
:~>tying it to a PC running an OS with a supported driver might meet your
:~>needs if you have the resources. Or a dual-boot machine could print
:~>files from a Canon-Driver supported OS.
This samba suggestion made me think... I wonder If one could let the
VMWare acces this printer? I have seen something about VMWare beeing able
to directly acces some of the hardware, but never tried it out myself...
It would be a big vaste of resources, but it would be interesting to know
if something like that is feasible. Besides, for people who have been
using Windows before (and why would else you have such a printer) it could
even be a kind of solution- if it works...
So, my suggestion in case there is no windows machine around would be:
Linux box + VMWARE with win9x in "host-only" networking mode and letting
the VMware directly access the printer, or setting up a filterless
("raw") spool on a linux box if this is impossible.
In order to print from a linux box, virtual machine must export the
printer to linux box and "smb-printer" must be set-up on a linux-box,
which uses a smb-printer on a virtual machine. Sounds completely crazy,
but it COULD work. Just for the case VMware cannot use the printer-port
directly, the whole system could be set-up in an even weirder way:
1) set up a raw printer on a linux box and export it with samba
2) set up a network-printer on a virtual machine which uses the "raw"
printer from a linux box
3) smb-printer on a linux box which sends the data to virtual machine...
Now, this issue has woken-up my curiosity:
1) if one acceses such a printer with samba, which formate should be sent
to printer spool? windows-metafile? Do windows actually have
smart-filters, i.e. can I send this printer a postscript? (As you can see,
all of my printers are attached to Linux boxes).
2) I wonder if the above mentioned idea could work with wine somehow?
That would be the "ultimate solution of the winprinter problem".
(OK, the ultimate solution would be destroying every existing winprinter
and burning the winprinter factories, but i believe there is a law against
that.)
WDYT?
Denis
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Mag. Denis Havlik <http://www.ap.univie.ac.at/users/havlik>
University of Vienna ||| e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Austria (@ @) tel: (++431) 4277/51179
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