Printing

Wow. Times sure have changed. Getting printing set up in linux used to suck. Before you had to sacrifice some animals, and pray to the printing gods for something to print correctly. This time around it was painless for me (and the animals). I installed cups and foomatic and made sure I had the properly compiled kernel. Went to linuxprinting.org and got a ppd file for my printer, which I saved to /usr/share/cups/model/. Configuring a supported printer is simple.

	
# /etc/init.d/cups start


	
# lpadmin -E -p hplj4l -m HP-LaserJet_4L-ljet4.ppd -v parallel:/dev/lp0


	
 Replace hplj4l with an arbitrary printer name.
  
 Substitute your ppd file and the location of your printer


	
# lp some_text_file


	
  testing if printer works


	

There's a little blurb about printing in OpenOffice in the gentoo guide to printing. Worked great for me. You can read the guide too if you are interested in printing with GIMP and SAMBA.