Another dragon slayed

Yet another blockade blasted down! I finally got printing to work. I long ago gave up trying to share the printers directly from my PC-BSD box with the Windows computers on the network, so I had moved both the laser printer and the Canon color printer over to my work box, which runs WinXP Pro, and shared them from there. But I just couldn't get connected to them from my PC-BSD box, although Samba seemed to be running like a charm.

Awhile ago, I was having problems with the cups server hanging as I was booting up, so I changed the line in my /etc/rc.conf to say:


cupsd_enable="NO"



instead of yes. But you really need to have cupsd running if you're going to do any printing from your Linux or BSD box, so I decided to try and get it running, by connecting it to the printers on my Windows box via Samba. But whenever I'd run the Printers item from KDE, I'd get some strange error about unable to connect to the cups via IPP or some such.

And then I noticed that even Samba had stopped working, and when I tried to get it started from the commandline, it too gave me the same error things like kdeprint were giving me - libgnutls.so.15 couldn't be found. Now I have no idea what this is or where it went to.

So I did a "portmanager net/samba3" to upgrade my Samba and then that started working again. And I found out that you do CUPS configuration via the web browser, by connecting to localhost:631. So I did that and added a printer via Samba, using the "URI" of smb://delldual/ML-1430 (for my Samsung 1430 laser printer on my Dell Dual CPU system). And, surprise surprise, it all worked! My Canon i560 photoprinter was a little more problematic, as there isn't a direct printer driver for it. But it looks like the BJ-8700 driver is a fair match, so I used that. And I could even printer in color from OpenOffice, by using a magical incantation, as found on the PC-BSD forums and in the OpenOffice SETUP GUIDE:


$ /Programs/OpenOffice.org2.0.3/program/spadmin



spadmin is the "Printer Administration" program for OO, and will probably be found somewhere else, as that location is where the OO PBI stores it. In there, you make printer be 'kprinter -stdin' (assuming you are using KDE - the setup guide says for Gnome users to use the "Gnome equivalent" - if you know what it is, please leave a comment). Now I get the KDE Printer setup dialog when I print, and I was even able to print in color. Woo Hoo!