Solved lpd apparently not running

[Deleted member 9563]

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I used to use print/apsfilter and what I recall is that it set up the print directories in /var differently than W. Blocks guide.

Thanks shepper, that would indeed be a possible difference between the machines. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I'm assuming that apsfilter doesn't have any effect unless I do something with it.

Regardless of the the difference between machines, I've had a hunch that the problem is with the new version of KDE4, I don't entirely trust its manners. In looking around, I see that there are an awful lot of CUPS files installed. I haven't installed it, or even installed and unistalled, and there is no running CUPS process. However, is it possible that one of those files is accessed somewhere?

Edit to add: Another difference between machines, is that I installed flock on SCO. I did that because one of the man pages said that lpd used it, and I discovered it wasn't installed by default.

 

[wblock@]

According to hier(7), /var/spool/output does exist by default. But your system does not have it, so recreate it: mkdir /var/spool/output && chmod 755 /var/spool/output.

Ignore that bit about flock(2), it's a library call, not an external program.

 

[wblock@]

Oh, and probably should chown root:daemon /var/spool/output.

 

[shepper]

Perhaps I'm wrong, but I'm assuming that apsfilter doesn't have any effect unless I do something with it.

That would be true if you just installed apsfilter and did not execute the setup script. If you ran the setup script it would make new spool entries, set ownership, group and permissions and make an entry in /etc/printcap. From the apsfilter documentation:

4.1.2 Spool directory
The printer spooler daemon uses an additional directory (one for each printer) to buffer the files which are about to be printed, along with various administration data (e.g. log files). It is important that the owner, group and permission settings of this spool directory match the requirements of the spooler -- if in doubt, consult the documentation.

Do not use a directory on a shared or networked filesystem for this purpose!

LPRng users can simply accept all settings, since the checkpc program will be called later to ensure everything is correct.

 

[Deleted member 9563]

Thanks Warren, that did the trick! Both machines print properly now. I'm really grateful that you stuck with me on this one.

shepper: There may be something to that. Although the current /etc/printcap does not have an entry, I cannot remember if it did once in my first attempts and therefore could have changed some things. It seems likely.