| Andreas Klemm on Sat, 15 Dec 2001 13:40:18 +0100 (CET) |
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| Re: hplj-4M, apsfilter and RH7.1 |
On Fri, Dec 14, 2001 at 02:58:09PM -0800, ynotssor wrote:
> Greetings;
>
> I have a text-only RH7.1 box which is to be used as a Samba file and print,
> sendmail and NFS server. I am encountering difficulties in selecting the
> appropriate gs driver for a parallel-attached HP LaserJet 4M printer from
> within apsfilter/SETUP.
www.linuxprinting.org might give you a clue if you completely
have no idea what driver to choose, though it shouldn't be too
difficult, if you read the additional driver information documents
that come with ghostscript ...
The FreeBSD people do a good job inclusing 3rd party documentation
as needed, no clue how this is the case in RedHat.
In FreeBSD we use for example
/usr/local/share/ghostscript/7.00/doc for original gs docu
and
/usr/local/share/doc/ghostscript/7.00/{hpdj,pcl}
for the docu of 3rd party drivers, that are not automatically
part of the ghostscript distribution.
I think the trickiest part is, to get a ghostscript binary, that
includes the most important 3rd party add-on drivers.
HP for examples released open source driver for the most popular
HP printer types. They really produce a nice quality when printing.
This driver collection is called hpijs.
Another good 3rd party driver is pcl3 from Martin Lottermoser,
which supports many HP printer as the name "PCL3" already states
out.
Then there exist high quality driver from the gimp-print project.
The FreeBSD ghostscript-gnu and ghostscript-afpl ports for example
already contain those useful add on driver.
Additionally we have the possibiliyt to create ghostscript ports
with no X11 support, so that gs is able to run without having the
X11 libraries installed on the system which needs more space for
normally unused things ....
How this is managed in Linux, sorry I don't know.
At least it might be the case that you need to compile and install
gs yourself with ther proper driver or additional drivers as you
want ...
> SETUP starts with nitification of a number of
> missing filters,
What please ? Its always nice to get all facts ...
> but I assume this is acceptable behaviour.
But you are not sure, right ??
> If I query the gs driver availability from the command line,
> gs fails to start due to the lack of X11, but gs 6.51-12.rpm
> installed correctly with dependencies met,
> and SETUP gives me quite a selection of available drivers.
Well if you have a gs binary that has been build with x11 support,
then you need exactly that version of X11 shared libraries ...
It doesn't mean you have to install the complete X11, but it means
that at least you have to install these shared libs matching two
things:
- same X11 version
- same shared library version ...
It might be the case, that the dependencies are not correct ...
BTW, FreeBSD ports collection has packages for gs without X11
support or offer at least this compile time option.
I think, that if you'd try FreeBSD 4.4 or soon coming 4.5 you
would have less problems, since the ports collection handles
many things in a cleverer way and resolves port dependencies
better ... At least you habe more control, what needs to be
installed and with what options to compile ...
SETUP doesn't check, which drivers are compiled in into your
gs binary. We teach SETUP, that might be possibly. If its there
is another question. It might be the case that we probe the
existence of the driver later ... but currently I'm not really
sure and would have to evaluate myself ...
But since you can execute gs -h yourself, this is a thing,
that _CAN_ be resulved by the user very quickly ...
SETUP was not intended to replace the users brain ... so to say
resolve every issue for the user ...
It already is relatively clever and has good functionality, but
you should know still a little bit, what you want (or what your
gs has compiled in ;-)
> The printer states on its demo output page that it is using PCL5, and is
> currently set to 300dpi. laserjet, ljet4, PCL-3+ and other drivers produce
> an apsfilter test page with "illegible" output.
You said earlier, that gs itself doesn't seem to run ... so from
what output do we speak about now ???
If you were a little bit more precise on what
you did and what exact message came, when you did it,
we would know more now ...
> It's curious that the same type of output is generated from a W2K
> laptop when it is parallel-attached, using the HP drivers.
I don't understand you now ... Again, you said, that
"gs fails to start due to the lack of X11"
So how you assume that you get suitable output.
Ridicolous. Sorry. You are arguing using completely
wrong assumptions.
gs doesn't work, if you don't have the X11 shared libs installed.
Period. All you get as output is perhaps a pile of error messages
on the commandline and some garbage on stdout _if_ any ...
> I would appreciate any help in installing, configuring and selecting the
> correct apsfilter driver for this printer.
Seems, that you have to learn a lot about Unix, selecting
proper software, getting a feeling for troubleshooting,
learn how to make reasonable bug reports ...
But .. isn't that a challenge ;-)
To be serious ... we havbe to nail down every thing that might
be a show stopper ...
The most important thing for me is ... if you have a small machine
without X11 installed, then I bet you are missing the needed shard
libraries. And if your gs is compiled to need that libs, it won't
startup ans won't run correctly. Therefore its NO WONDER, that
everything doesn't run .....
And now ... how can you check which libraries you need ?
here it comes:
root@titan[ttyp2]{194} ~ ldd /usr/local/bin/gs
/usr/local/bin/gs:
libpng.so.5 => /usr/local/lib/libpng.so.5 (0x28283000)
libz.so.2 => /usr/lib/libz.so.2 (0x282a5000)
libXt.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXt.so.6 (0x282b2000)
libSM.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libSM.so.6 (0x282fc000)
libICE.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libICE.so.6 (0x28305000)
libXext.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x2831b000)
libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x28329000)
libm.so.2 => /usr/lib/libm.so.2 (0x28404000)
libc.so.4 => /usr/lib/libc.so.4 (0x28420000)
libXThrStub.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXThrStub.so.6 (0x284b9000)
Linux should have the same or similar command.
Important are the version numbers of the shared libraries.
If they don't match, you also have a problem, then the shared
libs won't be found by your binary. I.E.:
libXt.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXt.so.6 (0x282b2000)
^--- this is the expected location of the shared lib
^-------- this is the version number ...
Another location might be resolved by you link loader, but not another
filename (another version number).
An upgly hack is to do some trickery with symblic links, but I won't
recommend that and instead recompile gs or finding the correct
shared libs package ...
Andreas ///
--
Andreas Klemm
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