Printer Support

[Phelsumania]

If you were in the market to buy a new printer would it be plausable to buy a printer which has an sd card slot built into it, that has the capability to printing documents and photos straight from an sd card.


Then if you could have an cheep 1gb sd card which you could save files for printing onto then quickly eject the sd card, pop it in the printer and print the files you want?

 

[Prometheus]

There seems to be a few libs missing from the NAND to make it possible to contain cups in a PND. I have successfully made cups run from a PND, and I was able to install a printer and print a test page from my pandora. However, no programs found the printer. If printing from the stock firmware ever becomes real, it will probably be in the form of a tutorial on how to install cups to NAND.

Whilst I can't speak for anyone else, that would work fine for me.

 

[DaMummy]

as long as it doesnt take up too much space, and is a single install/write to nand and not write to it every time youre using printer, im all for it. but i wouldnt include it in repo and the like for safety purposes

 

[ckblackm]

I'd want whatever solution to be able to print to a networked printer (via tcp/ip)

 

[DrKlaw]

I was able to print to a networked printer.


High level steps were:


Install CUPS through a PanDebian created Debian (Wheezy on an ext2 SD partition) chroot.


Configure CUPS to use printer (in my case, an HP C5180 - very easy to configure)


Test page prints fine


So far I am not able to print to this via a native Pandora application, but the printer shows up in the print manager. However, LibreWriter, which I installed through the chroot, did print.


It was a bit of an adventure getting the PanDebian Wheezy chroot working, however. I had to disect Gregor's scripts and do a bit of surgery. Not a task for the timid! PanDebian seems to install Squeeze without any issue, but I couldn't get CUPS to install on that version.


Hope this helps someone.

 

[slaeshjag]

I was able to print to a networked printer.


High level steps were:


Install CUPS through a PanDebian created Debian (Wheezy on an ext2 SD partition) chroot.


Configure CUPS to use printer (in my case, an HP C5180 - very easy to configure)


Test page prints fine


So far I am not able to print to this via a native Pandora application, but the printer shows up in the print manager. However, LibreWriter, which I installed through the chroot, did print.


It was a bit of an adventure getting the PanDebian Wheezy chroot working, however. I had to disect Gregor's scripts and do a bit of surgery. Not a task for the timid! PanDebian seems to install Squeeze without any issue, but I couldn't get CUPS to install on that version.


Hope this helps someone.

Either the programs compiled for the pandora is missing something, or the firmware is. I got CUPS to run from a PND, but the only program I could find that would even see the printer was Midori, and when I tried to print with it, the fonts was all messed up.

 

[DrKlaw]

I was able to install IceWeasel (Firefox) in the same debian chroot as CUPS and it prints perfectly.

 

[slaeshjag]

Could you try copying over it to SD/whatever and see if you can get it working running on Ångström while still finding the printer?

 

[DrKlaw]

I'll give that a shot when I can figure out how.


My guess is it won't work since it only seems that the printer works from within the jailed chroot, but I'll let you know.

 

[slaeshjag]

Well, even if you run it in the chroot, it should be exposed outside. I might have a set of pandora-compiled binaries of cups accessable somewhere as well.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

I know this is an old thread, but I have a question related to this. I want to set up a printer shared from a Windows machine. When I try to install the printer, the samba option isn't in the printer setup in PanDebian, so I did "other" and typed in smb://<ip_address>/<printer_share> but when I get to the naming the printer part, it says "client-error-not-possible".