Printing on OpenBSD by Darrin Chandler [27 October 2006 12:18 MST]
Some months ago my wife's computer running Windows XP got too slow to use. Most Windows users are familiar with that problem. The longer you have a computer, the slower it gets. This one was bordering on unusable, even though there was no indication anywhere that anything was wrong. Rather than trying to “degunk” the computer I installed OpenBSD, KDE, and OpenOffice.
It was a fairly easy install, and my wife noticed how much faster it was for common tasks like web surfing and email. Only a couple of things were missing, namely a flash player and printing to our HP DeskJet 5550. My wife occassionaly complains about being unable to access some flash driven web site, but so far it hasn't been that much of a problem.
The lack of printing ability has been of much more concern, especially with a teenage daughter with school assignments to print. Not having much (any!) Unix printing experience I resigned myself to learning how, but found roadblocks at every turn. The “old school” method of lpd and friends seemed a maze of twisty little passages, all different. CUPS looked easy and KDE promised integration, so I tried that. Everything appeared to configure fine, but it didn't actually work. I tried something else (can't remember what) and found that it wanted their own special version of Ghostscript. Yuck. Everywhere I turned there was some reason why I'd have to become a printing guru just to get a test page out.
Dru Lavigne to the rescue! After searching for many things I finally search for “unix printing” to begin my ground-up education. What I found was a short, sweet onlamp.com article by Dru entitled Unix Printing Basics. The biggest thing I got out of it was a simple step-by-step recipe. Apparently, this is the first time in history anyone has thought to do this. Or perhaps Dru has violated a secret taboo. In any case, having a working config (even for someone else's equipment) gave me a jumping off point. Man pages now made more sense. I had a working setup in minutes after finding this article. Thanks, Dru!
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