Setting up a printserver using CUPS, Ghostscript and IJS Printer Drivers

Turn your USB inkjet printer into a networked postscript printer.

1. Make sure CUPS is working and you have access to the web frontend.
   See http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/DebianSlug/Printing on how to install the kernel modules for USB printing support. Add Allow From directives for your host/network to the <Location /> and <Location /admin> entries in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf. Open the CUPS web interface at http://your_slugs_ip:631/printers(approve sites).
2. Look up your printer on http://www.linuxprinting.org/(approve sites) to find out which driver to use.
   The most common options are either a built-in ghostscript driver, or the external hpijs or gimp-print drivers, accessed through ghostscript's IJS interface. Right now it's not possible to use native CUPS drivers (like the cupsys-driver-gimpprint package), because it needs the gs-esp package which isn't available.
3. Install packages.
   For a basic ghostscript setup you need gs-gpl, foomatic-db, foomatic-db-engine, foomatic-filters and all it's dependencies. For HP Printers you need the foomatic-db-hpijs and hpijs packages, for most other inkjet printers you need ijsgimpprint and foomatic-db-gimp-print. In this howto i'll use the Gimp-Print packages for my Epson Stylus Color 880.
4. Generate .ppd file for your printer.
   1. Find out your printer's drivername and printerid. You can look them up in the local foomatic database:
      foomatic-ppdfile -A -P "Stylus Color 880"
      As we have to access gimp-print through the IJS interface, the driver will be gimp-print-ijs, the printerid is Epson-Stylus_Color_880.
   2. Generate .ppd file
      foomatic-ppdfile -d gimp-print-ijs -p Epson-Stylus_Color_880 > /usr/share/cups/model/myprinter.ppd
      The name of the generated .ppd file doesn't matter, just make sure it's unique on your system.
   3. Restart CUPS
      /etc/init.d/cupsys restart
5. Add & configure your printer in the web interface.

To test if your printer is working you can print a test page from the web interface.

Enabling browsing in CUPS

If you want your Linux and Mac OS X machines to automagically find your the printer on the network, you have to enable browsing in cupsd.conf. In most cases you just have to uncomment the BrowseAddress @LOCAL entry and restart cups. To avoid problems if your system doesn't have a DNS entry you should also set the ServerName directive to your print server's IP.

Note by Mick - edit password added to attempt to foil spambots - password is "n0spam"