Built-in Drivers
The Gnome printing configurator may not work on your platform, especially if you are using a lower-powered machine (e.g., 350 MHz @ 384M RAM or less). There is a much better alternative: CUPS (the current de facto standard Linux internal printing system, which Foresight happily uses) has its own web-based configurator already built into your machine. Take a web browser to:
http://127.0.0.1:631
and try it out. There are a great many drivers built in already, and you can set any printer which can use them, with this method. Also, if your printer is a PostScript printer or a printer which uses any of several other standard printer languages which have evolved over the years, you can choose a compatible driver, and it will work.
Compatible Drivers, Standard Printer Languages
Your printer may well be a PostScript printer, or a PCL printer, or a printer compatible with another; in days of yore, when dot-matrix impact was the norm, more than half the printers on the market could accept IBM Graphics Printer language (or "codes"), including many lasers. The upshot is that if there is no built-in CUPS driver for your printer, and you either have the manual or can find a copy of it online somewhere, you should probably read it and see if there is an "emulation" mode, or "compatibility" of some sort; if there is, this will be the quickest way to get your printer to work. It very likely may not have all of the fancy features of your printer available, but it will work, and quickly, if this capability is in there.
The two most common compatibilities for laser printers today are probably PostScript and PCL. The best laser printers today often do both, automatically. The CUPS PostScript driver is excellent, and has been seen to work on some really way-out hardware for which no Linux driver at all is known to exist. The HP LaserJet drivers are all PCL unless explicitly stated otherwise, and there is a hidden trick to match the version: an HP LaserJet III uses PCL version 3, an HP LaserJet IV uses PCL version 4, et cetera. There are weird exceptions; one brand new $10,000 laser/copier/scanner/fax this writer worked with, was said by the supplier to work fine with the HP LaserJet V driver, but instead needed a "Minolta PagePro 8, subtype Foomatic+ljet4" driver found in CUPS: it was an educated guess, based on the fact that a number of its bits were made by Konica Minolta. And for color, the generic PostScript driver was the only one found to work...but it does work, and very nicely.
But many printers today have no such compatibilities. For these, we have to have drivers specific to the particular printer.
Specific Drivers
There are three broad categories of CUPS drivers known to this writer, and there are likely to be more. These categories are being set according to installation technique, not according to internal technology!!! As much as possible, this is an installation HOWTO, not a technological overview ![]()
The first step when needing a printer-specific driver not included in CUPS, is to find it. Some manufacturers are making Linux drivers easy to find, so do check their web site first. The best other place to find one, seems to be:
On this page:
http://www.linuxprinting.org/printer_list.cgi
you will find a form-query for a huge list of printers, with many links and much information.
If you are going to use a driver not built into CUPS, you will have to obtain it from the web somewhere, and then install it. Here are three different types of printer driver installations; if more surface, this section will be lengthened.
Compilable/installable.
The HP Color LaserJet 2600n is a good example of a printer whose driver which must be compiled and installed in a very standard fashion.
PPD.
The Konica-Minolta MC2550 laser/copier/FAX has a PPD driver.
RPM/source only.
The driver for the Brother DCP-130c can be installed only from RPM or source code.
How do I install rpm drivers on Foresight linux. Conary does not seem to recognize it? Thanks.