[clug] Foolishly fiddling with a GDI printer

[Mike Carden]

Yesterday I foolishly bought a cheap, cheap colour printer. It's a
Fuji Xerox CP205 'laser' (LED actually) device with an Ethernet port.
I became all excited about the prospect of parking it on my home LAN
and making it available to everyone to print on.

It was only after I bought it that I realised its cheap price would be
because it's a Windows GDI printer. Purchasing fail. On the up side,
my daughter's Win7 laptop prints to it just fine.

Then I saw that there's MacOS-X support for it and that it's via a PPD
file. My hopes were raised again.

So I downloaded the Mac dmg file from Fuji Xerox and set about seeing
if I could get a PPD from it.

First I had to apt-get install dmg2img so I could uncompress the dmg
file. Then I mounted the img as a loopback file system and found that
it contained a pkg file called:

Fuji Xerox Print Plug-in Installer.pkg

I copied this off the read-only loopback to a place where I could
fiddle with it.

Then I apt-get installed the xar archiving utility and extracted the
package file to find a couple of directories, ppd.pkg and plug-in.pkg.
Each of these contained a file called Payload that needed to be
gunzipped then fed into cpio like this:

cpio -id < Payload

...which revealed a nested set of directories that finally yielded a
gzipped PPD file for my printer. Yay!

Reading the PPD file, I found that it references files in the
plug-in.pkg file tree so I set up that tree and the PPD on my system
so that the PPD would find all it needs. Down at the bottom of the
tree in plugin.pkg/Library/Printers/FujiXerox/filter/fxmhbpl.bundle/Contents/MacOS/
there are fourteen files called FXM_nn where nn is two or three
capital letters. The file command says that all of these are: Mach-O
fat file with 3 architectures

When I try to print to the machine, I get an error in CUPS that tells
me that one of these FXM_nn files has 'failed'.

So maybe they're binaries unique to MacOS, but maybe I'm mere steps
away from getting this to work. Any ideas?

Ta,
MC