Gentoo Printing Guide

1. Installing CUPS and foomatic

Setting up printing in Gentoo Linux is a relatively painless task, thanks to some great programs such as CUPS (the Common Unix Printing System) and foomatic. Both of these programs are currently in the Portage tree, and they are very easy to set up for the end user.

Please be aware the cups is cross-desktop, i.e. you can follow these directions to get printing working under GNOME or KDE. There are other options, such as KDE's print setup, but I believe that CUPS is the easiest to setup, and the most scalable.

Before emerging CUPS, it is a good idea to add the necessary USE flags to /etc/make.conf.

add cups, foomaticdb, ppds and usb (if you are using a USB printer connection) to your existing USE var list. 
USE="cups foomaticdb ppds usb other_var1 other_var2"

For more information on USE variables, please see the USE flags chapter in the Gentoo Handbook.

# emerge cups
# emerge foomatic 

2. Setting up Kernel Modules

General 

Now that the necessary packages are installed, it is time to install the printer.

Depending on what type of printer connection you will be using, it will be necessary to enable either parallel port or USB port printer connections in the kernel.

USB Modules 

To enable USB printer support, go to USB support and enable Support for USB and USB Printer support. Enabling them both as modules will install usbcore.o and printer.o in your modules directory. I suggest using modules because you won't have to restart your computer. Users of a 2.6 kernel will find these options under Device Drivers.

After the kernel is built, and your computer restarted, it is time to load the necessary modules:

# modprobe usbcore 

(For 2.4 kernel users:)
# modprobe printer
(For 2.6 kernel users:)
# modprobe usblp

After the modules have loaded successfully, plug in the printer, and check dmesg to see if it was detected.

# dmesg | tail

You should see something like this:

hub.c: USB new device connect on bus2/2, assigned device number 2 
printer.c: usblp0: USB bidirectional printer dev 2 if 0 alt 1 proto 2 vid 0x03F0 pid 0x1104

Parallel Port Modules 

To enable Parallel port support, go to Parallel port support and enable Parallel port support and PC-style hardware. Depending on your printer you also have to activate Multi-IO cards (parallel and serial), Support for foreign hardware and IEEE 1284 transfer mode. Then go to Character devices and enable Parallel Printer Support. Users of 2.6 kernels will find these options under Device Drivers.

After the kernel is built, make sure that the printer is plugged in and then restart your computer. Now it is time to load the necessary modules:

# modprobe lp (Only for 2.6 kernel users)
# modprobe parport 
# modprobe parport_pc

After the modules have loaded successfully, check /var/log/messages to see if the printer was detected.

# tail /var/log/messages

You should see something like this:

lp0: using parport0 (polling).

Low-level testing 

Before setting up the printer with CUPS, we can test it with some simple low-level commands.

# touch test.txt
# echo "Hello World" > test.txt
# cat test.txt > /dev/usb/lp0 

 Alternatively, for parallel port printers: 
# cat test.txt > /dev/lp0 

3. Special Printer Drivers

Before you use foomatic to generate a PPD file, it may be necessary to locate the third party drivers for your printer. For example, Epson provides several printer drivers for open source operating systems. However, as with Epson's, many of these special drivers are not open source.

The following printing drivers are available as ebuilds in Portage: gimp-print, omni, hpijs, pnm2ppa.

For most printers besides HP Inkjets, you will be able to use the standard Linux printer drivers. Visit the linuxprinting.org printer support database to find information on your specific printer. Make sure you read the documentation provided with any driver you download for installation and licensing information.

If you are using an HP Inkjet printer, it is necessary to emerge the hpijs printer driver. This driver handles all of the Postscript interpretation necessary to make the HP printer work. The hpijs driver is for HP Inkjet printers only, but is available through Portage for your convenience. The documentation from HP for the hpijs driver will be placed in /usr/share/doc/hpijs-<version>. The author highly recommends reading this.

If you are using a PPA-based printer it is necessary to emerge the pnm2ppa printer driver.

# emerge hpijs

4. PPD File Configuration

Now it is time to configure the printer and CUPS. In order for your printer to interpret Postscript correctly, CUPS needs a PPD (Printer Postscript Definition) file. The easiest way to generate a PPD is through foomatic.

Three pieces of information are necessary in order to make the below command work; you need your printer ID, printer device, and your print driver (this would be hpijs if you needed to install the special driver above). The printer ID and driver can be grepped from foomatic's database, and the print device is what device node your printer is connected to (i.e. file:/dev/lp0, file:/dev/usb/lp0 or for samba printers smb://user:password@server/share).

Before using foomatic-configure, please remember to start cupsd.

# /etc/init.d/cupsd start

(Fill in your printer model in $printer_model and printer ID in $printer_ID)
(Use the output of the first two grep statements to fill in the last foomatic-configure command)
# grep $printer_model /usr/share/foomatic/db/source/printer/* 
# grep $printer_ID /usr/share/foomatic/db/source/driver/* 
# foomatic-configure -s cups -p $printer_model_number -c file:$print_device_path -n queue name -d driver 

If grepping for the driver doesn't work, you can search for your printer on LinuxPrinting.org and check what drivers it is known to work with. Then pick one of those drivers and install:

(If you have multiple printers, use separate queue names. Otherwise an
easy-to-remember queuename, such as "default", suffices)
# foomatic-configure -s cups -p <printer model> -c file:<printer device> -n <queue name> -d <driver>

Now, here's a more specific example. The following code assumes that you have an Epson Stylus Color 980. Of course, you should replace this with your actual printer model.

# grep "Stylus Color 980" /usr/share/foomatic/db/source/printer/* 
 Now look for the line which reads: 
/usr/share/foomatic/db/source/printer/Epson-Stylus_Color_980.xml:   <model>Stylus Color 980</model>
 Epson-Stylus_Color_980 is your printer ID. 

# grep Epson-Stylus_Color_980 /usr/share/foomatic/db/source/driver/* 
/usr/share/foomatic/db/source/driver/gimp-print-ijs.xml:  <printer><id>printer/Epson-Stylus_Color_980</id></printer>
 Here, your print driver is gimp-print-ijs.

# foomatic-configure -s cups -p Epson-Stylus_Color_980 -c file:/dev/lp0 -n Epson -d gimp-print-ijs 

5. CUPS Configuration

Since the printer itself is now configured, now CUPS must be setup to handle the printer queueing. CUPS can be accessed via web browser on port 631 of the printer server.

CUPS has a built in configuration file for the daemon that should at least be modified to allow for URI-like device naming. Open up /etc/cups/cupsd.conf with your favorite editor and set FileDevice to Yes:

# nano -w /etc/cups/cupsd.conf
(Set FileDevice to Yes)

For those who want to set up clients using the new print server please look in /etc/cupsd/client.conf on the client machine and point the ServerName parameter to the network name of the print server.

# rc-update add cupsd default
# /etc/init.d/cupsd restart

The CUPS daemon should now be running, so open up your favorite browser, point it to http://localhost:631 and click on Manage Printer. Here you can find your newly installed printer, configure it or print a test page. Make sure you set the default page size to the page size you use (e.g. A4 instead of Letter).

6. Configuring programs to print using CUPS.

General 

Most programs today have a native cups interface, so you need not change anything, just try to print in the program.

The GIMP 

To be able to print documents using The Gimp, you have to (re)install the gimp package with the "gimpprint" USE variable enabled. This will install gimp-print if it isn't already done.

(Be sure to have USE="gimpprint" enabled)
# emerge gimp

Now, open up The GIMP, and open an existing picture, or just some blank pic, it really doesn't matter because all we are looking for is the File menu. Right click on the image and go to File/Print The dialog for printing should come up, and when it does, click on new printer. If your printer is not already listed, type in the name of your printer, then select your printer type. Ok, you are now setup to print from The GIMP. Play with the settings and have some fun.

7. Using Linux as a Windows Compatible Print Server

Linux makes a great print server, then again, it makes a great everything server. The first thing to do is edit /etc/samba/smb.conf to fit your settings. The smb.conf file contains all of the settings that will make your Linux box look like a Windows NT server to any Windows machine. I have included an very utilitarian example smb.conf below. Edit as needed to fit your network environment.

[global]

workgroup = YOUR_WORKGROUP
server string = Gentoo Linux Server
encrypt passwords = True
security = user
smb passwd file = /etc/samba/private/smbpasswd
log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m
socket options = IPTOS_LOWDELAY TCP_NODELAY
domain master = Yes
local master = Yes
preferred master = Yes
os level = 65
dns proxy = No
name resolve order = lmhosts host bcast
bind interfaces only = True
interfaces = eth0
hosts deny = ALL
hosts allow = 192.168.1.4 127.0.0.1 (list of allow hosts here) 
debug level = 1
create mask = 0644
directory mask = 0755
level2 oplocks = True
read raw = no
write cache size = 262144

[printers]
comment = All Printer
path = /var/spool/samba
browseable = no

Most Windows drivers are PCL drivers. Jobs sent from Windows should be interpreted by CUPS as application/octet-stream and printed as raw file. So if you use CUPS, open up /etc/cups/mime.types and uncomment the following line:

application/octet-stream

Do the same for the following line in /etc/cups/mime.convs:

application/octet-stream application/vnd.cups-raw   0 -

Now that the SAMBA is configured, restart samba, go to your Windows machine and install a network printer. Piece of cake, eh?