Re: Printing in Linux unreliable over wireless

larwe_at_larwe.com
Date: 01/17/05 

Date: 17 Jan 2005 10:16:25 -0800

>Windows Me was not designed with printing from non-Microsoft OS's in
>mind. If possible use a print-server designed for for the task.
D-Link,
>HP and others make print servers for this, a couple of examples;

Hmm. I'm not changing the hardware (e.g. buying a dedicated print
server, new printer or new wireless router) because I'm not willing to
spend any money on this issue. The hardware in question is in fact a
300MHz Geode single-board computer with 64Mb RAM and a 20Gb hard disk,
in a small box about 1/3rd the size of a shoebox. So I could install
Linux on it if that would solve the problem.

Note that the printer has parallel and RS422 interfaces only, and
cannot have a JetDirect card installed into it.

The reason I installed WinME is because that was a quick and dirty way
to make sure my wife (who uses WinXP) could access the hard disk and
printer shares. It's always a pain in the ass for me to get samba
serving up files and printers nicely to WinXP (and Windows in general).

Anyway, the problem does not appear to be in the back-end or the
network layer. Everything works perfectly when my Linux laptop is
hardwired into the LAN. My wireless LAN, in general, works perfectly
with the Linux laptop for non-printing purposes. (There are dropped
packets, of course, which one has to expect on a wireless network).

The problem appears to be with cups on the laptop. It seems that cups
just dies unrecoverably when anything goes temporarily wrong with a
print job - it's unable to retry a dropped packet, in other words - and
there is no way of flushing the queue without deleting and recreating
the queue. I'd settle for a method of clearing the queue painlessly,
although I'd LIKE to hear that there is some way to make cups printing
to SMB printers more robust...

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