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linuxprinting.org
Authored by: moritzh on Sep 13, '05 01:12:15PM

Didn't read the whole hint and the other posts really carefully, so I don't know if this would have helped in those cases, but http://linuxprinting.org is an excellent resource which has helped me to set up a printer for which there are no Mac OS X drivers.

In my case it was a Kyocera FS-1500 which is not a postscript printer and only has a parallel port. So the first thing was to get a parallel-to-USB converter cable. The packaging and the accompanying driver CD obviously only promised compatibility with Windows and didn't mention OS X, but in good faith that attaching almost anything to a USB port of a Mac would work out of the box without additional drivers (and with the assurance of the store that I could return the rather pricy cable (20 EUR) in case it wouldn't work), I just bought it. And it worked!

Beforehand, I had generated the appropriate PPD file from linuxprinting.org and installed foomatic-RIP from there which is required for that to work. I did that a while ago, so I can't remember the exact details. I remember having to retry a few times because there were some problems with my ghostscript installation I think. Part of the problem was also that I did not yet have the converter cable at that time so testing/debugging was a bit hard without the ability to actually connect the printer... :)

Anyway, just wanted to point out that linuxprinting.org is an excellent resource for making older printers (or printers for which there is no native driver from the manufacturer) work. Why? Because thanks to CUPS etc. there are big similarities between printing on Mac and Linux and thanks to LInux (not yet) being supported well enough by many manufacturers and the creativity and technical skills of some Linux folks, they are almost forced to come up with solutions on their own which Mac OS X users can profit from! :-)



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