"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

The Answer Guy

By James T. Dennis,
Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org/

winprinters & MTAs

Pointers and Corrections

From John Levon on 05 Jun 1998

Hi, two points:

1) for win printers, someone has written a PPA driver. i don't have the URL, but it was mentioned in 2 cent tips a while ago i think. This possibly enables win printers to be used with linux

In fact I had heard of it. However, it had not progressed far enough along, last I checked, to be worth mention in LG. It's a tough call for me whether to go dig up the latest scoop on a digression or whether to gloss over it in the interests of conveying the more important message.

The important message is that "Winprinters" and "Winmodems" are a big lose for everyone involved (even for Windows '95 users, who may find them "abandoned" in future versions of Windows and NT). These are not "progressive" developments in the hardware market. The other important message is that we shouldn't have to reverse engineer these protocols.

While I admire the heroic efforts of people like Andrew Tridgell (original architect of Samba, who implemented it by analysis of the packets off "the wire")

For those that are interested in some info on the HP PPA printer drivers for Ghostscript and Linux look at:

Ghostscript Printer Compatibility

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/printer.html

... and follow their link to:

(Tim Norman's) PPA for the masses

http://www.rpi.edu/~normat/technical/ppa/index.html

... and for other printer stuff for Linux try Goob's:

Linux Links: Software : Utilities : Printer

http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/Utilities/Printer/

2) instead of www.faq.org, try www.faqs.org. this is a top site that automatically contains HTML versions of FAQs on rtfm.mit.edu

thanks,
john.

Doh! I looked for that by memory and tried "faq.org" first. I didn't think to try "faqs.org" (and it wasn't in the bookmark file on the machine I was typing from at that moment). I remember being impressed with faqs.org and as disappointed when I look "back" (finding the wrong one).

Thanks for catching that!

Copyright © 1998, James T. Dennis
Published in Linux Gazette Issue 30 July 1998

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