Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

Hello,

We wanted to use HP 2600n color laserjet printer as a network printer and print from applications running on AIX5.3.

After we configured the print queue,(pointing to the 2600n's IP) we could see the queue is UP/Ready. But, when we fired print, the job disappears.

Brought down the queue, fired print job, could see the job is queued. Once brought up the queue, the job disappears.

Later i found, there is no corresponding driver fileset for 2600n (lslpp -l printers.hp* )

I could not find the drivers from HP site as well. Any idea, where can i get the HP printer device drivers for AIX? or anyone has come across this problem before and how resolved it?

Thanks in Advance.

#AIX-Forum

Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

Looking at the HP site I found the following:

Print languages, standard
Host-based (uses the processing power and resources of your computer to process the print job. No PCL or PostScript)

Windows 98 SE; Windows 2000; Windows Me; Windows XP Home; Windows XP Professional; Windows Server 2003; Mac OS X v 10.2; Mac OS X v 10.3

Note, this does not even include HP/UX, the HP Unix operating system.

The printer appears to only have a USB cable, so I'm not sure how you are attaching it to the network.

Now, my sermon on AIX print drivers. The printer drivers in AIX consist of two parts.

1. The part that sends the job to the printer. For local printers this is the serial or parallel port driver which is the same for ALL local printers. The only difference when you specify a different printer is that the buffer sizes and timeout values may be slightly different.

1b. For network attached printers, this part of the driver is the code that sends the job to the printer. This can be rembak (the AIX LPR program that sends jobs to port 515), piohpnpf (The AIX program that sends jobs to HP JetDirect style printers with a default port of 9100), and the IBM printer drivers which you can ignore here.

It is likely that this is a netbios based printer. There are some workarounds, but they normally involve printing through a Windows based server and are unsupported by IBM or HP.

2. The second part of a print driver on AIX is the 'virtual printer'. This is maily based on a file we call the colon predef file that is located in /usr/lib/lpd/pio/predef. These files are based on the printer language (for example PostScript, PCL, ASCII text, IPDS, PPDL, etc.) The colon file is not like a Windows printer driver, it does not do WYSIWIG or generate the printed page. These virtual printers add setup information that select the paper tray, the font, set text jobs to landscape or portait and set the line and page lengths. For text jobs, these also add CR to LF. So you can normally select any PCL printer and get most of what you want for printers that support PCL. You may get errors for the wrong paper tray or some illegal PJL commands, but these are fairly easy to fix. But when you have a PC based printer, then we normally do not have enough information to support these.

There is a package for Windows that 'reportedly might fit in the middle'. It is called 'RPM' - Report Print Manager. See:

http://lpd.brooksnet.com/index.html

I do not have any experience with this product or endorse it any any way. The better solution is to buy a printer that is supported. Planning and using supported equipment will save you money and time in the long range.

John Tesch (Coauthor: Printing for Fun and Profit Under AIX 5L)
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