Solved CUPS PPD - no printing anymore

blackhaz

blackhaz

At some point, I think after the recent packages upgrade, I've lost the ability to print on my Brother printer under FreeBSD. (I've adopted Linux PPDs to use with CUPS - which worked really well until today...)

Turns out, PPDs and printer drivers are being deprecated in CUPS:
github.com

Remove print filters and printer driver support · Issue #4 · OpenPrinting/cups-sharing

Note: The goal of this issue is to have a place to discuss the eventual removal of printer driver support and support for raw queues in OpenPrinting CUPS v3.0. The original Apple CUPS bug report ha...
github.com github.com

Although I am not sure how this is related to the current CUPS 2.4.11 used. There are no errors or any kind of messages in the CUPS logs.

The talk is to install some kind of printer application, e.g. ps-printer-app, but I don't see anything in our repos.

Does anyone have any idea how one can continue printing in FreeBSD or where I can look to troubleshoot this?
 
And in the best traditions of my posts on this forum, the solution was found immediately after the post:

Modify the printer in CUPS to use IPP instead of LPD/LPR. Same driver, everything works. Although the question on what shall we do with the depreciation of PPDs remains open.
 
on my several systems both 14/stable and 15-current i see that :
/usr/local/libexec/cups/filter/commandtops crash with signal 11 SIGSEGV using CUPS -2.4.11
when using the OKI C844 linux PPD file.
using installed binary package or compiled from ports makes no difference.
 
drsnx60 said:
on my several systems both 14/stable and 15-current i see that :
/usr/local/libexec/cups/filter/commandtops crash with signal 11 SIGSEGV using CUPS -2.4.11
when using the OKI C844 linux PPD file.
using installed binary package or compiled from ports makes no difference.
Click to expand...
One possibility is that OKI inserted some code in the ppd that relies on Linux Libraries. These typically are algorithms for optimizing the printing of graphic files (*.jpg). I suspect if you look at the ppd code you will find reference to files that aren't on your FreeBSD system.
If this is your printer:
https://www.oki.com/eu/printing/products/colour/a3/c800series/c844/specifications/

It supports both a PostScript emulation and PCL6. If you use a generic postscript file or pxlcolor with a filter, it should mostly work - with the exception of the above mentioned algorithms.
https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/printing/#print-pdls-table

Paper trays, page size, page orientation, print density ...etc... should all work. You can use image editing, GIMP/Krita/Imagemagick/A2PS, to pre-process your images.
 
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