[Lpr-discuss] Re: printtool

[Nick M. <ni...@va...>]

begin  Sergio A. Sotelo quotation:
> A few day ago I migrated from Debian Potato to Testing (i386), and
> now I have some problems with printtool. Before, I had
> printtool+lprng but now printtool need lpr-ppd. Now I can't print in
> my smb printer.. and master-filter dissapears..  Any suggestions..?
> Can you give me a reference (URL) for some help about..

	The printtool that is up there *should* work with LPRNG.  If
apt replaced lprng with lpr-ppd, that may be because of an incomplete
dependencies line.  

	It's also possible that the folks who are working on the
gnulpr and HP Enhanced Printing System dropped lprng support, but I
don't think so.  I've cc'd their mailing list on this message.  (I've
been off that project for a couple months now.)

> I've been reading Print Howto, and all the documentation of .deb
> files.. I've searched at Debian web site for developers discussions,
> but I can't find anything useful.

The key is here:

[beaujolais(~)] apt-cache show printtool
Package: printtool
Priority: optional
Section: admin
Installed-Size: 185
Maintainer: A Mennucc1 <debian@Tonelli.sns.it>
Architecture: i386
Version: 4.03-5
Depends: lpr-ppd, gs (>= 4.03), pconf-detect, wish (>=8.0.4) | tk8.0
(>= 8.0.4)  | tk8.2 | tk8.3
Filename: pool/main/p/printtool/printtool_4.03-5_i386.deb
Size: 45352
MD5sum: 588a160928b5c00092bafbd90fc2cf8b
Description: Tk-based printer configuration tool
 This is an enhanced version of the Red Hat printtool, with
 autodetection of printers and PPD support.

	If you see that "Depends:" line, you'll see that it lists
"lpr-ppd", when it should (I believe) list "lpr-ppd | lprng".  

	If you're desperate, you can build your own version of the
printtool .deb and reinstall lprng.  I'm sure the lpr-discuss people
will come up with more elegant solutions, however.  

		Here's some basic instructions:

1: add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian testing main contrib 

2: apt-get update
3: apt-get install autoconf automake build-essential lintian debhelper
dh-make debmake devscripts dpkg-dev fakeroot

	These are all packages necessary for building the printtool
package.  If you get errors during the build process, then I probably
missed some.  In potato, you have task packages, but testing currently
doesn't have task packages yet.
4: make a directory to work in
5: cd into it and run "apt-get source printtool" (you don't need to do
this as root)

	Apt will download source files and make a directory called
something like "printtool-4.03".  
6: cd into this directory, and edit the file debian/control
7: change the Depends: line to have "lpr-ppd | lprng" instead of just
"lpr-ppd", and save it.
8: run "debuild" 
9: you'll now have a .deb in the directory you made in #4.  You can
dpkg -i it as root now.
10: reinstall all of your favorite software (lprng, magic-filter,
whatever).

-- 
Nick Moffitt, SourceForge