I know this shouldn't be this hard. Maybe it's because I have a very old printer, I don't know. I do know that I was able to make this all work when I had lprng installed, but that was in a Red Hat installation, and I haven't been able to get lprng running in Mandrake.
Here it is again in case you missed it, plus summaries of assistance to date (thank you Anne and Stephen for your efforts): I have Mandrake 9.0, installed just about every package cause I have the space. I have not yet upgraded anything via the upgrade link in the K menu. I have configured Samba (2.2.6-1.0pre2.2mdk) so my two other Win98 machines can see the Linux box and can access shares. I have iptables configured so the two computers can get to the internet. They cannot ping the Linux box, but I may have willfully prevented that. I have configured cups (1.1.16-0.4mdk) so that I can print locally to my antique HP DeskJet 540 printer. I also enabled raw file printing by uncommenting the two related lines in the mime.* files, but only after seeing a complaint about that in the error log. So far, everything works. Except, I can't print from the Win98 machines. Every attempt results in an error stating it cannot convert file 0 to a printable format and hints that ESP Ghostscript is not installed. I just finished compiling and installing ESP Ghostscript 7.05.5, but the error persists. I was unable to find any reference in the local docs or at the cups website that could help. I am assuming I need to tell cups where to find espgs apart for just restarting cupsd, but I'm at a loss how. Or why. Anne suggested I stick with the recommended printer driver when configuring cups. I don't see much difference in performance, but since I am only printing locally, I could be overlooking something, so I did set the driver to the recommended one. Stephen suggested I use Webmin to configure the printer. I did try, but it complained that lpd is not installed. I didn't see that I could tell Webmin not to use it. As I said earlier, I tried to install lprng because I know it works for me, but I couldn't. I tried to compile the source but it complained that /usr/include was not a system directory. I don't think I have an ANSI C compiler, which the web site suggested I use. I could install the RPM after satisfying dependencies, but it wouldn't complete the configuration process, telling me that, as root, I didn't have permission to access a directory or create a file. Hrumph. It's kind of depressing that something as simple as printing could be so hard, especially since it seems this kind of problems shouldn't exist because it's not documented at all. I mean, I jumped through all the hoops I think I should have used, but it still fails. Any suggestions? Is this something I could stump the experts with? Thanks for reading my lenghty diatribe (would be shorter if I didn't use adjectives, I guess). And many thanks for any assistance you can offer. Larry
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