[gentoo-dev] Printing: CUPS and HP LaserJet on JetDirect

[Denis Shcherbakov]

I have spent a few days trying to get my Gentoo box to print with CUPS, on
a remote network HP LeserJet 4M printer, sitting on a JetDirect interface.
I have tried every possible tweak of my cups and xinetd config files
(there was a recommendation to emerge and configure xinetd in order to get
CUPS working on Gentoo):  tried both CUPS and GIMP-PRINT *.ppd drivers for
this printer.  Every time I tried to print a test page from the web admin
tool for cups, I had the same output:  job cancelled at <time>.   If I
tried to re-activate the job, I got "Error: client-error-not-possible".

Then I got a tip from Donny Davies (a Gentoo Developer), who forwarded to
me Jeffrey D. Kowing's message regarding this matter in [gentoo-dev],
where he says that getting a fresh *.ppd from sourceforge.net solves the
problem.  So I went to sourceforge and got a PPD file for my HP LasetJet
4M, which is generated as HP-LaserJet_4M-ljet4-ppd.ppd, put it into my
/usr/share/cups/model/ with all other PPD's, deleted my current printers
and ran from the commandline (for JetDirect)

/usr/sbin/lpadmin -p printer_name -E -v socket://printer_IP:9100 -m
HP-LaserJet_4M-ljet4-ppd.ppd

restarted cups and xinetd just in case

/etc/init.d/cupsd restart
/etc/init.d/xinetd restart

checked if the printer is up, enabled, and accepting jobs

lpstat -p -d -o

and sent it a job

lp some_file.ps

And it worked like a charm.  The only thing I wasn't able to understand is
why it generated two empty sheets of paper before the job comes out, but
hey - it's recyclable :))

I hope this helps SOMEone.  Please email if you need something clarified,
since I spent like 3 days on this particular issue.

Denis