Use PC printers from IRIX?

[Meinrado F Samala]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the quick reply. Using LPRng seems to be a very attractive
idea. I will look into it.  I agree that redirecting a print job to a PC
non-postscript printer doesn't solve the problem of the printer not
understanding PS. If I understood it correctly, LPRng has an added filter
to convert PS->PCL.  
An alternative: according to IRIX help I need the Adobe postscript
interpreter (license to use is not free:(   to use a non-PS printer.
What do you think?
Oh well, I'll see and consider the options...

Thanks :)

Mein Samala
Dept. of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Univ. of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
1-301-405-0373
FAX 1-301-405-9376






On Tue, 26 Sep 2000, Mike Brodbelt wrote:

> 
> 
> Meinrado Samala wrote:
> > 
> > Hello.
> > 
> >        I understand that Samba allows PC's running Windows OS to see
> > Unix computers (files and printers) as part of its network
> > neighborhood.   My question is whether Samba will also allow UNIX
> > systems to see and use Windows files and printers as well.
> >       We mostly have WindowsNT computers in our lab and we have one SGI
> > Octane. Since we already have set up and mainly use our PC resources (HP
> > deskjets and laserjet) we'd rather not buy another printer (and a more
> > expensive postscript printer at that) for local connection to the SGI
> > computer if we can print over the local network.  We have so far been
> > forced to FTP image files from SGI to PC.
> >       Thanks very much.
> 
> Samba provides some utilities that can be used to achieve what you want
> - the smbclient program can be used as part of a Unix print filter, to
> transfer jobs to an SMB shared printer. However, this is not the
> approach that I would recommend for this.
> 
> Your SGI will produce output to print in PostScript format. Simply
> transferring the job via SMB won't solve the underlying problem that
> your printers will then throw up an "invalid personality" error. With
> network connected HP equipment, I'd get and install LPRng and it's
> associated print filter, ifhp. With these, you can set up a print spool
> on the SGI that will receive PostScript, convert it into PCL suitable
> for your printer, and than transfer it directly across the network to
> the printer.
> 
> The ifhp HOWTO has information on how to chain ifhp and ghostscript to
> translate PostScript -> PCL, and the LPRng HOWTO has information on
> setting up LPRng to talk to a networked HP printer (they simply listen
> for jobs on port 9100).
> 
> Check out www.lprng.com for more info.
> 
> HTH
> 
> Mike
>