Printing to MS hosted printer?

[Neil Ford]

Well thanks to Nik and Gabi Veneat I now have a FreeBSD laptop happily
printing to an HP 5Si and an HP 8500 (in colour!).

In the end it turned out to be decidedly easy.

Step 1:
Install SAMBA. (/usr/ports/net/samba)  This will install smbprint which is the
important bit.

Step 2:
Install APSFILTER (/usr/ports/print/apsfilter). This installs ghostscript and
a whole raft of filters for you as well as allowing you to set paper sizes
etc.

Step 3:
Run /usr/local/apsfilter/SETUP. This runs you step by step through the setup
and produces a functioning /etc/printcap file. This is definitely life saving
software.

Step 4:
Send the maintainer of apsfilter a postcard (as per the licence agreement) to
say 'Thank You'. The cost of a stamp is worth it :-)

Caveats:
I'm sitting on the end of a T1 and with a number of options selected the
installation of the software took over two hours. So if you need to do this
over a dial-up, do it at the weekend.

The default /etc/printcap has an entry for lp as a local printer in it. This
needs to be commented out or the names of the apsfilter printers changed
before lpd can be started.

As you can imagine, I'm a very happy bunny.

Neil.
-- 
Neil Ford
neil at ourshack.com / neil at binky.demon.co.uk