Cannot connect to printer...

[Colin J. Raven]

On Jan 22 at 12:27, Kiffin Gish launched this into the bitstream:

> I have read the manual carefully, looked in the forums and tried everything,
> but for the life of me I just cannot get my printer to work under FreeBSD.
>
> Actually my setup is nothing complicated or so you would think. I have an HP
> Deskjet 720C connected to my parallel printer port. It workes just fine
> under Windows so I know that the hardware, cables etc. are fine.
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions?

Well, I'm a newbie myself, but...
I think some more details might be helpful:
Are you sharing (or intending to share) your printers amongst Windows 
clients? If so, Samba is necessary, as is swat. (uncomment the swat line 
in inetd.conf) also you may (or may not since apprently this is a hot 
issue) may wish to use Cups.
You could also manage much of this process from within Webmin if you 
have it installed - it's a great tool, I wouldn't be without it. I don't 
say webmin is a substitute for the command line, but a terrific adjunct 
to it. /usr/ports/sysutils/webmin takes your right to it. Getting samba 
up and running is fairly trivial if you do it all (or mostly) from 
webmin, also webmin has a swat interface!!
Concerning the specific printer model, well I just don't know. You would 
have to do some reading on the CUPS help page.

If you do want to use cups, cupsd has to be running.
At that point you can play with some cups 
settings on the web based admin page (see below). I suggest starting 
with webmin first and enable stuff from there onwards in stages.

Localhost URL's for various www-based admin interfaces:

Webmin (unless you configure it differently) defaults to: 
http://localhost:10000
or, if you have SSL up and running at 
https://localhost:10000

Swat ([S]amba [W]eb [A]dministration [T]ool) - once enabled - is 
available at:http://localhost:901

CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) is available at:
http://localhost:631

Ports you may care to install:
Webmin: /usr/ports/sysutils/webmin
Samba:  /usr/ports/net/samba3

These are some suggestions only, and obviously predicated on the 
assumption you want to enable printing via Samba/CUPS. Should you wish 
to approach the matter from a Unix-only perspective, YMMV.

Good Luck!

Regards & HTH,
-Colin
--
Colin J. Raven
FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE - http://www.FreeBSD.org - There can be only One
Sat Jan 22 13:21:00 CET 2005
  1:21PM  up 2 days,  2:11, 5 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00