{"id":9,"date":"2006-04-08T22:57:21","date_gmt":"2006-04-08T22:57:21","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-06-01T22:01:48","modified_gmt":"2020-06-01T21:01:48","slug":"08042006","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/2006\/04\/08042006\/","title":{"rendered":"Printing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I tackled an outstanding issue with our home computer setup – my inability to print.<\/p>\n

\"Holcuast<\/a>Last year we bought a Canon iP4200 printer as our replacement for the Epson left in North America. The printer is pretty good; it handles duplex printing, has reasonably priced ink, and when setup to print photos does a very acceptable job indeed. The only downside was lack of a Linux printer driver, other than the commercial TurboPrint<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One work around for this was to have the printer connected to a MacOS X machine and shared over the network. Fedora Core 5 can see MacOS X shared printers on the network and can print to them as if they are a postscript printer. In practise this didn’t work without setting up an entry in the \/etc\/hosts file so that the hostname of the machine hosting the printer could be found.<\/p>\n

Today I tried to figure out why FC5 couldn’t use Zeroconf to discover the address of the MacOS X machine instead of having to manually setup the \/etc\/hosts file. The answer is fairly straight forward: FC5 is missing the nss-mdns library which provides this functionality. Thankfully it’s easy to get hold of and configure this, something I’ve documented in “Zeroconf in Fedora”<\/a>. Having sorted this out I can now print directly over the network.<\/p>\n

In a piece of additional good news, Canon have made available an iP4200 printer driver<\/a> for Linux. It’s not currently publicised anywhere on their European support website, but can be found directly on their Japanese ftp site.<\/p>\n

To use these drivers install the following files:<\/p>\n