Win98/HP Printer problem. Partially Solved.

[Kevin Everets]

I set up a print/fax server here using RH Linux 6.0, and Samba 2.0.3. The
printer is an old (but still very reliable) HP Laserjet 4. Printing from
the Linux box using lpr works fine. However, whenever someone tries to
print from a Windows98 box through SAMBA, there is an extra page printed
on the end. This gets really annoying to the users, more so because the
extra pages cannot be put back into the printer as they become slightly
curled and jam almost every time.

I set up a "print command = cp %s /tmp/print.%s" in order to see what the
heck was happening. Looking at the file reveals an odd bit of code at the
end of every (PCL) job:

^L^[E^[%-12345X

The ^L seems to be required to push out the last page, but the rest of it
appears to make an extra blank page print. Very strange. This code isn't
generated by Ghostscript when the users print out Postscript stuff.

To get around the little extra page problem, I just popped a filter into
the printcap file which runs sed and removes the extra garbage.

So: before SAMBA, the Win98 Print Server worked fine. After SAMBA (but
before filtering), there was always an extra page from the Win98 clients
even though the Linux printing worked fine. Questions being: is this a
problem with SAMBA? Should it be pretending to handle printing like the
old Win98 Print Server? Is there a better (or more elegant) way that any
one knows of to prevent the extra page from printing when using SMB
clients if this isn't a problem with SAMBA?

Thanks for your help,

Kevin.