[hpoj-devel] Re: officejet

[<pa...@rc...>]

Hi, Edwin.

Edwin van Opstal wrote:
> I have a Mandrake distr, that works with CUPS and initially it recognised the 
> officejet correctly and used the cdj550 driver. It wasn't perfect, especially 
> not in colour (rather rough, also b/w pictures), b/w (text) was ok at first 
> sight, but up close you could see that the letters are a bit rough around the 
> edges.
> Mandrake doesn't work with lpd, but has CUPS and the installation works a 
> little different from the Redhat printtool, but I managed to install ptal and 
> now used the DeskJet970 and the difference is noticable. Text is a lot less 
> rough around the edges, but especially graphics are a lot better, both b/w 
> and colour.
Try the new HP DeskJet 9xx driver available from
http://hpinkjet.sourceforge.net.  It may give even better output, although
it doesn't support duplex printing at the moment.

> Sane installed at once without problems and works fine, I use xscanimage 
> mainly through the GIMP (it works stand-alone too, although the command line 
> gives an error message). I only found that scanning under Linux is a lot 
> slower than under Windows.
How much slower are we talking about?  In my experience, scanning under 0.7
was decent (but I don't have experience with the Windows software for
comparison).  I've heard that it's slower with 2.4 kernels and SMP systems.
Scanning also seems to be slower with the new I/O driver in CVS (for parallel
anyway, USB seems pretty good).  I'm looking into optimizing the new code.

> Some comments about the documentation that came with the hpoj driver:
> * In the PRINT-HOWTO you mention that ptal-printd can be started at boot by 
> modifying /etc/rc.d/rc.local, without an explanation how. Could you please 
> give me a lead?
Personally I generally start it by hand when I need it, but if I were going
to automate it on my system I'd probably just edit /etc/rc.d/rc.local and
add the necessary commands at the end of the file.  In the case of a default
install of 0.7, the command might look something like this:
	/usr/local/bin/ptal-printd mlc:mlcpp0 -like /dev/lp0 &
(But don't hold me to it exactly.)

There have also been some init scripts floating around, which in the long run
will make this easier.  I will look into incorporating this into the codebase
at some point.

> * Perhaps you can include a small comment that you have to create a symbolic 
> link to xscanimage from the gimp/plug-ins directory in order to scan from the 
> gimp (I guess most people will use that).
They really should document this better in the SANE package, because this
question comes up occasionally on the sane-devel mailing list.  I'll make
a note of this in SCAN-HOWTO, but I'll need to research the specifics since
I don't know it offhand.  Do you remember where you found this information?

> * The three first insmod command in the INSTALL file gave an "already exists" 
> result, and the last two did not. Does this mean that:
> - I always have to switch the OJ on before the PC?
With 0.7 and earlier, yes.  Some time ago I posted an untested patch to
remove this requirement.  Let me know if you need it and I'll look for it.

> - I always have to manually invoke the last two insmod commands?
There was a recent thread on hpoj-devel about how best to automate this.
I posted to the "Bugs and TODO" page the lines that should be added to
/etc/modules.conf in order to have the kernel modules loaded dynamically.

> * You mention a little further that I can unload the modules, but with what 
> command?
rmmod.

> I've successfully installed the drivers for my G55 on a Mandrake 7.2
> system.  Printing works fine from any program except for StarOffice
> 5.2.  I have tried to change some settings in spadmin, but no luck
> yet. Before I  installed the hpoj drivers, I was using the standard
> drivers from cups and  that worked fine, although the printing quality
> was a lot less.
>
> When I print from StarOffice I only get blank page.
Is StarOffice generating a PostScript print job?  Perhaps you could somehow
tell it to save the PostScript to a file instead of sending it to the printer.
Try viewing this .ps file with "ghostview".  Does it look OK there?  What
happens if you print (using lpr) the .ps file?

> PS: Trying to scan from SO makes the hd led do overtime and SO quits
> after a  while saying that it doesn't have enough memory (128 Mb), but
> I don't care,  since I only want to scan from the Gimp anyway. 
StarOffice is famous for being a memory hog, so I'm not surprised this
happens.  How does StarOffice do its scanning anyway?  Does it somehow
invoke SANE?

David