adding unlisted printers with redhat-config-printer

[Joe Beach]

On Wed, 2004-01-28 at 12:46, Stephen Walton wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-01-28 at 09:36, Joe Beach wrote:
> > On Wed, 2004-01-28 at 09:25, Tim Waugh wrote:
> > > Try using foomatic-ppdload.
> > 
> > I just tried it and got:
> > 
> > # foomatic-ppdload TKPH5601.PPD Tektronix-560
> > Printer Tektronix-560 does not seem to exist in the database!
> 
> I think the foomatic-ppdload documentation is wrong.  foomatic-ppdload
> is a Perl script which early on has the lines:
> 
>     if (! -f "$libdir/db/source/printer/$printer.xml") {
> 	die "Printer $printer does not seem to exist in the database!\n";
>     }
> 
> meaning that unless $printer.xml already exists it stops.  Even
> commenting this out, though, doesn't really help, because then
> foomatic-ppdload seems to do nothing but append a nearly empty entry to
> ppd.xml whose purpose seems to be to just tell foomatic that the printer
> exists.
> 
> That is, I think you need the .xml file and not the .ppd one.
> 
> -- 
> Stephen Walton <stephen.walton at csun.edu>
> Dept. of Physics & Astronomy, Cal State Northridge
> 

The replies here have been helpful. I went to
/usr/share/foomatic/db/source/printer and created the file
Tektronix-Phaser_560.xml. To create it, I made a copy of the existing
file Tektronix-Phaser_780.xml and replaced the references to 780 with
560. It looked like it had similar features to the 560. Next, I ran
foomatic-ppdload and got:

# foomatic-ppdload TKPH5601.PPD Tektronix-Phaser_560
Writing
/usr/share/foomatic/db/source/opt/ppd-Tektronix-Phaser_560-TKColor.xml
Writing
/usr/share/foomatic/db/source/opt/ppd-Tektronix-Phaser_560-OutputOrder.xml
Writing
/usr/share/foomatic/db/source/opt/ppd-Tektronix-Phaser_560-TKMPFMedia.xml
Writing
/usr/share/foomatic/db/source/opt/ppd-Tektronix-Phaser_560-OutputMode.xml
Writing
/usr/share/foomatic/db/source/opt/ppd-Tektronix-Phaser_560-TKImageSmoothing.xml
Writing
/usr/share/foomatic/db/source/opt/ppd-Tektronix-Phaser_560-InputSlot.xml
Writing
/usr/share/foomatic/db/source/opt/ppd-Tektronix-Phaser_560-PageSize.xml
Writing
/usr/share/foomatic/db/source/opt/ppd-Tektronix-Phaser_560-Option3.xml
Writing
/usr/share/foomatic/db/source/opt/ppd-Tektronix-Phaser_560-Option1.xml
Writing
/usr/share/foomatic/db/source/opt/ppd-Tektronix-Phaser_560-Option2.xml
Reading /usr/share/foomatic/db/source/driver/ppd.xml
Writing /usr/share/foomatic/db/source/driver/ppd.xml

After that, when I ran redhat-config-printer and added a printer, the
Tektronix 560 was available in the printer list. I was able to add it
and print a test page with no problems. I haven't tried to use the edit
function to change the printer settings, so I don't know if this fix was
100% effective yet. 

Joe