Printing to Win98 Machine

[Peter Samuelson]

[Artie Ball <artie.ball at aacc.com.sa>]
> On the win98 machine, I have an Epson Stylus printer which I am
> trying to print to from the Linux boxes...... can I get it to
> work...... no!!!!!

Question.  Are you feeding the Epson the right file format?  I have no
idea what type of printer this is, or what types of input it accepts,
so you'll have to figure that out.

Does it take PostScript?

Does it take plain text?

Does it take PCL or some similar language?

...Or is it one of those "Made for Windows" printers?  (The ones that
tend to freak out if you actually try to use your computer for anything
useful while print jobs are spooled?)

If the latter, you're not likely to have much luck.  Even though the
printer is connected to a Windows box, the input to the printer is
generated directly on your Unix box -- no translation is done by the
Windows-side print driver.

How to verify that you are generating the right output format: generate
a print file from your Unix host (be it PCL, PS, text, whatever), and
copy it to your Windows host.  Open up a DOS box and say something like

  copy my.file.to.print \\my_computer\my_printer

That basically goes through the same procedure as the Unix host should
do if you have smbclient printing set up, only there shouldn't be
anything wrong network-wise since it's using loopback.

I have no experience with Mandrake Linux; it follows that I have no
clue what this "printtool" is.  Hope I was of some help anyway.

Peter