S
OLVING
P
ROBLEMS
7.33
7
I can’t print to an SMB
(Windows) printer.
To be able to configure and use SMB-shared printers (such as
printers shared on a Windows printer), you need to have a
correct installation of the SAMBA package that enables that
feature. The “smbclient” command should be available and
usable on your system.
My application seems to be
frozen while LLPR is
running.
Most Unix applications will expect a command like the regular
“lpr” command to be non-interactive and thus return
immediately. Since LLPR is waiting for user input before
passing the job on to the print spooler, very often the
application will wait for the process to return, and thus will
appear to be frozen (its windows won’t refresh). This is
normal and the application should resume functioning
correctly after the user exits LLPR.
How do I specify the IP
address of my SMB server?
It can be specified in the “Add Printer” dialogue of the
configuration tool, if you don’t use the CUPS printing system.
Unfortunately, CUPS currently doesn’t allow you to specify the
IP address of SMB printers, so you will have to be able to
browse the resource with SAMBA in order to be able to print.
Some documents come out
as white pages when
printing.
Some versions of CUPS, especially those shipped with
Mandrake Linux before the 8.1 release, have some known
bugs when processing PostScript output from some
applications. Try upgrading to the latest version of CUPS (at
least 1.1.14). Some RPM packages for the most popular
distributions are provided as a convenience with this Linux
Printing Package.
I have CUPS and some
options (such as N-up)
seem to be always enabled
even though I don’t choose
them in LLPR.
There may be some local options defined in your ~/
.lpoptions file, which are manipulated by the lpoptions
command. These options are always used if not overridden by
LLPR settings. To get rid of all options for a printer, run the
following command, replacing “printer” with the name of the
queue: lpoptions -x printer
I configured a printer to
print to a file, but I get
“Permission denied” errors.
Most printing systems will not run as the super-user but as a
special user (usually “lp”). Therefore, make sure that the file
you have chosen to print to is accessible to the user owning
the spooler daemon.
On my PCL (or GDI)
printer, I sometimes get
error messages printing
instead of my document.
Unfortunately, some Unix applications may generate non-
compliant PostScript output that may not be supported by
Ghostscript, or even the printer itself in PostScript mode. You
can try to capture the output to a file and view the results
with Ghostscript (gv or ghostview will allow you to do so
interactively) and see if you get error messages. However,
since the application is probably at fault, contact your
software vendor to inform them of the issue.
Problem
Possible Cause and Solution