Printing in FreeBSD

B

Beastie7

Lately I've been contemplating on nuking my macOS partition and using FreeBSD exclusively for the foreseeable future, but one thing I need a decent printing experience.

I'm wondering a few things;

- How does one confirm driver support for my printer? (Canon MG5220)
- Any recommended printer management utilities?, print/scan utilities? (I'm using FluxBox, if that means anything)
- What is your over all experience with printing/scanning with FreeBSD?
- Are there any gotchas I should be aware of? App combat. issues, etc?
- Also, how is WiFI printing in FreeBSD?


Thanks.
 
Beastie7 said:
Lately I've been contemplating on nuking my macOS partition and using FreeBSD exclusively for the foreseeable future, but one thing I need a decent printing experience.

I'm wondering a few things;

- How does one confirm driver support for my printer? (Canon MG5220)
- Any recommended printer management utilities?, print/scan utilities? (I'm using FluxBox, if that means anything)
- What is your over all experience with printing/scanning with FreeBSD?
- Are there any gotchas I should be aware of? App combat. issues, etc?
- Also, how is WiFI printing in FreeBSD?


Thanks.
Click to expand...

There is a section of the handbook on printing. I red it, it is very good. Read it and you will know how the printing system works. You also can establish if your printer works with decent probability.

Scanning, i don't know, my office printer puts scans in a shared filesystem. Another, in other office, sends scans via mail.

bye
n
 
Cups works for me. I use the same ppd file that is used on a Mac for a Kyocera at work. At home, with a Samsung, I got the ppd from a Linux install and just pointed the printer dialog to said file when setting up.
Scanning also works without problem--for that particular printer, the ArchLinux wiki had the information I needed. Cups will often automagically find the printer if it's on your network. The xsane program may be able to find it without you doing anything--it seems to be a fairly old printer, so there's a good chance. Normally, I'm not a fan of gui tools, but printing and scanning are things I do very occasionally but need them to work when I need them, and in this, case, CUPS has done a decent job for me. For scanning, you can also try, if you've installed xsane, scanimage -L which will let you know if the device was found.
 
scottro said:
Cups works for me. I use the same ppd file that is used on a Mac for a Kyocera at work. At home, with a Samsung, I got the ppd from a Linux install and just pointed the printer dialog to said file when setting up.
Scanning also works without problem--for that particular printer, the ArchLinux wiki had the information I needed. Cups will often automagically find the printer if it's on your network. The xsane program may be able to find it without you doing anything--it seems to be a fairly old printer, so there's a good chance. Normally, I'm not a fan of gui tools, but printing and scanning are things I do very occasionally but need them to work when I need them, and in this, case, CUPS has done a decent job for me. For scanning, you can also try, if you've installed xsane, scanimage -L which will let you know if the device was found.
Click to expand...

Thanks a lot. This is what I was looking for.
 
I would not be as optimistic.
These appear to be gdi printers.
OpenPrinting
Canon provides binary drivers for MacOs/Windows and maybe Linux. At best, you can try the linux binary with Linux emulation.
 
Generally it's a good idea to avoid Canon as they're not helpful to us. Any postscript printer is good though. I print with lpd and that's about as simple as it gets, but really all you need. Warren has the best page about lpd printing.
 
OJ said:
Generally it's a good idea to avoid Canon as they're not helpful to us. Any postscript printer is good though. I print with lpd and that's about as simple as it gets, but really all you need. Warren has the best page about lpd printing.
Click to expand...

That's all that I have at the moment; so I gotta work with it. I just can't justify spending more money over a driver issue; especially if I don't have to. I'll take a look at what others have suggested here.
 
OJ said:
I print with lpd and that's about as simple as it gets, but really all you need.
Click to expand...
I thought that too, and it's what I used for 20 years, but I just gave up.
There are too many packages that have a dependency on CUPS, and those dependencies install the CUPS usurpers for lpr/lpd into /usr/local/bin.
When that happened, lpr suddenly stopped working (because CUPS was not configured, and /usr/local/bin is first in my path). So I gave up resistance and switched to CUPS.
One nice outcome is that the CUPS driver for my old HP4050n takes all forms of modern postscript and automatically converts it to a postscript level that the printer can manage.
So I have to reluctantly admit that CUPS is better than what I used to have.
 
gpw928 said:
There are too many packages that have a dependency on CUPS, ...
Click to expand...
I think that's only true if you run a GUI. My FreeBSD machine is console (CLI) only, and runs very happily without CUPS. And it has three printers installed, ranging in age form 1 year old (color double-sided laser) to 25 years old (single-sided laser).

The only problem is this: I have not configured lpr queues for printing documents locally. For text files it works; for postscript/pdf/... files, it does not. I know it can be done, but I just haven't felt the urge to invest the hour that it would take. It's not a problem: the FreeBSD machine shares its file system with various GUI machines (typicall Macs), and I can print ps/pdf/... files from there.
 
ralphbsz said:
I think that's only true if you run a GUI.
Click to expand...
Possibly. I don't know why the System V interface was not made standard, and the lpr/lpd interface an extra (completely optional) package on *BSD systems. That would have broken nothing.
It's pretty invasive.
Code: 
[ritz.138] $ grep cups-2.2.12 /usr/ports/INDEX-11 | wc -l
    3758
 
gpw928 said:
Possibly. I don't know why the System V interface was not made standard, ...
Click to expand...
Because lpd/lpr has been the BSD printing system since the 80s. CUPS showed up in the late 90s on Linux. In my memory it was mostly a reaction to the difficulty of installing device-specific drivers in the existing (SysV lp and BSD lpr) solutions.
 
I have had good luck with Xerox printers (phaser 3260) on FreeBSD but I use CUPS, mainly because it is a desktop and is easy. I did specifically buy my printer based on the fact it does PCL/postscript printing because I knew it wouldn't use those OS specific binaries, even though I print through CUPS...
 
ralphbsz said:
I think that's only true if you run a GUI. My FreeBSD machine is console (CLI) only, and runs very happily without CUPS. And it has three printers installed, ranging in age form 1 year old (color double-sided laser) to 25 years old (single-sided laser).

The only problem is this: I have not configured lpr queues for printing documents locally. For text files it works; for postscript/pdf/... files, it does not. I know it can be done, but I just haven't felt the urge to invest the hour that it would take. It's not a problem: the FreeBSD machine shares its file system with various GUI machines (typicall Macs), and I can print ps/pdf/... files from there.
Click to expand...

DWM master race
 
ralphbsz said:
Because lpd/lpr has been the BSD printing system since the 80s. CUPS showed up in the late 90s on Linux. In my memory it was mostly a reaction to the difficulty of installing device-specific drivers in the existing (SysV lp and BSD lpr) solutions.
Click to expand...
You misunderstand what I meant, which was that the BSD port of CUPS should have provided the System V commands only by default, thus occupying an otherwise unused command line space, and avoiding conflict with the well established BSD lpr/lpd commands.
 
This often fine to run a GUI without having CUPS installed tweaking ports OPTIONS. I don't have it installed; however that also probably depends of what you use. I suppose DEs like Gnome should make it hard to remove CUPS.

Btw, CUPS was designed for corporate (complex installation) use but some people thought that was a good idea to depends on it for everything printing, probably because they think CUPS is cool - like many others decisions are made these days.
 
gpw928 said:
You misunderstand what I meant, which was that the BSD port of CUPS should have provided the System V commands only by default, thus occupying an otherwise unused command line space, and avoiding conflict with the well established BSD lpr/lpd commands.
Click to expand...
Oh, that seems to make sense. Sorry about that.
 
OJ said:
Generally it's a good idea to avoid Canon as they're not helpful to us. Any postscript printer is good though. I print with lpd and that's about as simple as it gets, but really all you need. Warren has the best page about lpd printing.
Click to expand...

Which printer and scanner brand is the most helpful / friendly when it comes to open-source drivers? What is the Nvidia of printers so to speak.
 
reddy said:
Which printer and scanner brand is the most helpful / friendly when it comes to open-source drivers? What is the Nvidia of printers so to speak.
Click to expand...
IMHO, the most open source friendly printer/scanner is to buy separate units. For printers choose one that supports PostScript or one of the drivers in print/ghostscript. For a scanner, look for supported models in graphics/sane-backends.

If you get an all-in-one, only HP (print/hplip) provides a usb driver that can handle both the printer and the scanner.
 
My Xerox Phaser 3260 just works. I do have to use the Phaser 3161n (?) driver from print/gutenprint, but after that it just works. Printer is on my network. Cost of the printer was around $80 US and replacement toner is around $50-60 US, which a little expensive but what do you do: any more printers are incredibly cheap. Prints duplex and works well. My Macbook prints to it as a "postscript" printer and did not require any driver install.
 
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