Printing on Linux

[Member blur13]

Has anyone here got printing 100% working on linux?

[Member Xunzi_23]

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Good Printing, Yes, on many devices.

Some are easy, some challenging.

Personaly I Run Brother MFC A3 Inkjet, A4 Laser for bigger monochrome jobs.
And if needed a TEC Starwriter which can produce true carbon copy.
I saw the Brother recommended long ago and brought the device second hand.

With care and the right printer Photo quality is excellent, calibrate monitor as well as possible
and keep it that way.
Takes a while to get best results from given toolchain. Darktable and Gimp mostly.
For quick and dirty edits I use XN View.

[Member PPC]

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I found this thread strange, because, like in one of (YouTube’s) Linus Tech Tips Linux Linux challenge video, I’ve always found it that printing, out of the box is far simpler in Linux than in any version of Windows I used (in my devices, that was from Windows 3 to 7)- in my office I’ve always used HP printers because I know about 100% of them have drivers for Linux (I’ve been using them for the last 20+ years). I had a simple and small Epson printer – it always worked in Linux. In the forum I read that it seems that Brother offers working drivers for Linux. For modern printers that support Wi-fi, I think it’s safe to assume that they work with any device (even my android phone, yeah, I tested).

For other brands of printers, I have no idea about how good printing support is in any OS…

P.

[Member RJP]

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I have. Even old Canon printers, whose do not working in Windows. 😉

[Member Xunzi_23]

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@RJP, No more drivers for windoze is not uncommon, applies to printers
and scanners. can be good at times.

I got my Laser Printer for free, owner told me no driver for win 10.
It was near new, less than 300 pages. Seems to have been made by Samsung
in Korea. Label says Siemens.

I extracted the proper PPD from a windoze driver CD, imported it in to cups.
Container was old win exe so I could rename to driver.exe.zip and unpack.

For those new to problem, PPD is post Script Printer definition, defines
the language the printer understands. And important for performance.

[Member RJP]

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Old laser printers are best, because they have not printing counter, which “breaks printer” after printing some number of prints.

[Member RJP]

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In linux, apparmor can prevent driver installation if apparmor is installed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppArmor

[Member mikey777]

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HP-printers are generally considered to be the best for “full-compatibility” with Linux – many distros are pre-packaged with the HPLIP drivers for this, see https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/bpu00658

One nice thing with HP-printers is that Linux provides a nice printer management console, one that allows checking of the ink-status, i.e. homing in on which colours need to be changed. The main thing I don’t like with HP-printers is that their cloned inks seem expensive, compared say to those for Epson models, which is why I continue to use Epson.

In general, I’ve found any printers I’ve used have worked out-of-the-box with Linux, though they might not all have full printer management control, e.g. showing ink-level status. I’ve had an Epson Stylus Photo R285 since 2010, and am still using it, since changing to Linux in 2014. The main disadvantage with the R285, and the only disadvantage as far as I’m aware, is to do with verifying ink-status. Compared to one or two HP-printers that I’ve tried, the Linux Epson drivers don’t allow checking of the ink levels of individual colours. It means that when the printer stops working, due to insufficient ink, the only means I have for identifying which cartridges need changing, is to plug the printer into an old standalone Samsung netbook running Windows XP (its printer management tool is excellent)…

This Linux printer-driver list might be useful: https://www.openprinting.org/drivers

• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by mikey777.
• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by mikey777.
• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by mikey777.

▪ 32-bit antix19.4-core+LXDE installed on :
- (2011) Samsung NP-N145 Plus (JP04UK) – single-core CPU Intel Atom N455@1.66GHz, 2GB RAM, integrated graphics.
▪ 64-bit antix21-base+LXDE installed on:
- (2008) Asus X71Q (7SC002) – dual CPU Intel T3200@2.0GHz, 4GB RAM. Graphics: Intel Mobile 4 Series, integrated graphics
- (2007) Packard Bell Easynote MX37 (ALP-Ajax C3) – dual CPU Intel T2310@1.46GHz, 2GB RAM. Graphics: Silicon Integrated Systems.

[Member PPC]

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mikey777 wrote:

ny printers I’ve used have worked out-of-the-box with Linux, though they might not all have full printer management control, e.g. verifying individual ink status

I can get individual color levels in antiX (using the “ink” package). That works for my HP printer. I seem to recall that I used some cli app to see my Epson’s ink level too…

P.

[Member mikey777]

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PPC wrote:

I seem to recall that I used some cli app to see my Epson’s ink level too…

Thanks PPC. It’d be really useful to know what app that was, if you can remember – maybe a dpkg –list would jog the memory …

▪ 32-bit antix19.4-core+LXDE installed on :
- (2011) Samsung NP-N145 Plus (JP04UK) – single-core CPU Intel Atom N455@1.66GHz, 2GB RAM, integrated graphics.
▪ 64-bit antix21-base+LXDE installed on:
- (2008) Asus X71Q (7SC002) – dual CPU Intel T3200@2.0GHz, 4GB RAM. Graphics: Intel Mobile 4 Series, integrated graphics
- (2007) Packard Bell Easynote MX37 (ALP-Ajax C3) – dual CPU Intel T2310@1.46GHz, 2GB RAM. Graphics: Silicon Integrated Systems.

[Member Robin]

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RJP wrote:

I have. Even old Canon printers, whose do not working in Windows.

Unfortunately I have experienced the complete opposite situation with my old Canon printer. On Linux (including antiX) I have to use virtualised Windows 2000 or XP on top (using virtualbox) to get proper printing results. I tried already to figure how to configure the printer properly directly in Linux, but all in vain. The printing results are awful (half resolution at best). My latest efforts to make it work can be found here: https://gitlab.com/Robin-antiX/capsl-iv-driver-support-for-linux Meanwhile I’ve extracted all the control sequences from printed pages (printed from within Windows 2000, using the option “print to file”). But I have to admit: By now I don’t have the faintest idea how to make cups understand the identified control commands and send them to the printer. That’s way above my paygrade… Only when sending the windows generated files from linux to the printer (by the command cat <printfile> >/dev/lp0 ) everything prints fine.

Xunzi_23 wrote:

I extracted the proper PPD from a windoze driver CD, imported it in to cups.

Could you please help me to figure how to do this for my printer? I do have backups of all the old windows stuff, including the printer drivers of my printer. What steps should I start with after extracting the files from the windows installer archive? In which of the files the needed pieces of information can be found? I’ve searched already manually file by file, but don’t know which information within these files is considered to be significant.

Btw, it’s about a Canon LBP 8 Mark IV, which is apart from the printer language completely identically to the HP Laserjet 4. While HP understands PCL, Canon only reads CaPSL. So it’s probably about modifying the HP linux driver for the Laserjet 4 that way it sends the CaPSL Control Sequences instead of the PCL control sequences.

Windows is like a submarine. Open a window and serious problems will start.

[Member Xunzi_23]

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Hi Robin, I downloaded some drivers to take a look, the printer needs feeding weird language.
The ones I found up to now some kind of postscript which is where PPD files come in.

did you already look at printer-driver-cjet, for sure the devs of below packet will, if needed be able to help more than me in this particular case.

Druckertreiber für Canon-LBP-Laserdrucker
CJET filtert Druckerdaten von der Standardeingabe zur Standardausgabe und wandelt dabei Escape-Sequenzen der HP Printer Command Language (PCL) und Datenstrukturen, z.B. Font-Header, in ihre CaPSL- Entsprechungen um.

CaPSL steht für Canon Printing System Language. Sie ist ein Satz von Steuerbefehlen, die für den Canon European Language Printer entwickelt wurden. CaPSL wurde in Canon-Exportmodellen wie den Modellserien LBP-8markIII und LBP-4 verwendet. Canons ältere japanische Modellen (LBP-A404 GII usw., LIPS-III als Standardbefehl) verfügen in der Regel über einen CaPSL-Emulationsmodus.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by Xunzi_23.

[Member Robin]

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Hi Xunzi_23

Xunzi_23 wrote:

did you already look at printer-driver-cjet, for sure the devs of below packet

Yes, I know this driver pretty good, it is the only one existing which produces at least some kind of output at all on this printer, and unfortunately it is exactly the one producing the horrible printing results. The poor results are clear to me, it only can do up to 300dpi, wile the LBP 8 Mark IV expects 600dpi for clean raster printing.
This cjet printer driver is a pretty crude construction, anyway: First it prints everything coming from the programs using ghostscript to Postscript, then loops the output through the old HP LaserJet II printer driver, which output is again piped via stdin and stdout to the cjet filter for replacing some of the control codes within this output to change the PCL to CaPSL format finally (cjet takes all data from stdin and hands it out after conversion was done to stdout).
I tried to change the hard coded constants, control codes and arithmetics within the cjet089 source code from 300 to 600 dpi, but this failed, since I’m not a programmer and understand only half of what I’m doing in C source. So no wonder it failed. I ended up with printing blanke stripes between stripes of supersized content.
Probably the HP input driver needs to get changed to the HP LaserJet 4 instead of LaserJet 2 first to make the filter work when changed to 600dpi operation, otherwise the chunks of raster data are still 300dpi while the changed control codes expect 600dpi. But even this I didn’t master to do. (Maybe you could have a short look on it and tell me what I did wrong, my modified version is in the attachement). Maybe you can tell me at least whether there is a chance at all to change it to 600 dpi the way I tried it.

I’ll attach also the original source for comparison.
(For upload I had to zip the tar archive to make board software happy. It is the original source package I had downloaded once from an university site in the states, it is licensed under GPL, so no problem uploading. Debian itself seems to provide binary sources merely.)

But I noticed in the source code of the cjet driver is an email address of the original developer. I’ll try to contact him, maybe I get a reaction. (Pretty unlikely, it dates from 1996, an address from tu-graz in Austria. But who knows… If only the old mailservers of this university are still up.)

Many greetings
Robin

—————————
Edit: Just noticed I was wrong. Debian actually has also the original source code still: https://salsa.debian.org/printing-team/cjet

Attachments:

1. cjet_0.8.9.orig_.zip
2. cjet089-modified-for-600dpi.zip

Windows is like a submarine. Open a window and serious problems will start.

[Member PPC]

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@Robin – any luck with this driver?: https://launchpad.net/~michael-gruz/+archive/ubuntu/canon/+packages (some 12 years old)

Edit: slightly newer versions here: https://launchpad.net/~michael-gruz/+archive/ubuntu/canon-trunk/+packages (about 10 years old)

• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by PPC.

[Member Xunzi_23]

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@Robin, sorry this case is beyond my capabilitys. A Debian maintainer who was involved Didier Raboud @odyx
is still highly active, maybe he can give background info or help.

You might find help from someone at open printing. The specific canon language version seems to be a secret.
Despite some intensive searching I have been unable to find any proper documentation. The device seems not to
offer any Postscript emulation.

I recommend to all, research a printer or scanner before purchase including at open printing org and for scanners
sane supported device listings. If a printer understands Postscript it will work pretty much anywhere.
Take “for free devices” but be prepared for problems which can make them expensive, time wasted, junk toner or ink
cartridges.. Some laser printers only work correctly with OEM toner cartridges. Inkjets are often chip matched.
Customers suffer.

For some very old devices long ago a friend recommended setting up a print server with historic windoze, not sure if
that could work or exactly how.
As the canon does document processing on printer rather than receiving a pre processed document as in postscript it
sounds feasible. You wrote about

• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by Xunzi_23.

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