I'm about to buy an Olympus P-400 Dye Sub printer ... now that the price has dropped almost $300 ... The problem is that it has three forms of direct input, and none of them include ethernet.

It's got parallel, usb, and a pc card slot for the smart cards and memory stick adaptors.

My question is, will a USB to Ethernet converter do what I want it to do in this case? Or is that just for usb host machines with no ethernet, and only a usb interface?

Or, what's the technology behind those ethernet print servers? Are they specific to particular manufacturers, or types of printer (dot matrix, laser, ink jet, etc).

Greg

USB to ethernet converters will not work.

I have one of these in a crappy NEC printer in the office. It definitely works well and is cheap. It will work with any printer. I recommend it. I bought it from this vendor as well. He always has a table at local computer shows and now has an online store.

Why not just share it off of one of your existing computers?

I guess I'm a little worried that it only supports windows or mac ... the computers that it'll be sitting next two are both linux. Surely there's got to be some driver issues before sharing a printer, right?

Greg

Yes, but you'll have those same driver issues regardless of what you use to share it. If you share it from a Windows computer, it'll be even worse, as Windows expects that the data being sent to the printer is already 100% correct by the time it receives it over the network (that is, it can't run a filter on the server's side). At least with Unix, you can have it run some sort of filter.

I had this same problem with the additional fact that my printer has no Unix drivers at all. So I had to do some serious hacking to get it to work. I documented it all here somewhere.... Hang on.

Yeah. Here you go.

Looking through CUPS and the linux printing faqomatic it appears they don't even know about olympus printers ;-) I guess the majority of the work here is done for printers doing simple text and graphics ... none of the printers listed appears to be a true photo printer, except some tektronix ones.

Is parallel much slower than USB (1.0, not 2.0)? So these print servers don't care about drivers right? And the windows box will be able to use the olympus drivers on the newly networked printer just fine?

Man I wish I had the money to just buy it and start playing around, hacking it into working. Sadly, once I get it, it needs to work right away.

Greg

Are there any issues with getting the printer manufacturer's drivers to work over ethernet to the print server?

Does it require the printer to be postscript compatible?

Greg

To be more specific, if all you want to do is print from Windows, then you'll have no problems at all, since all of the translation to printer language happens on the client's side.

Your problems begin when you want to print from you Unix clients. If that's not the case, then you're home-free.

Sorry. Posting at the same time as you.

All of the translation to the printer's language will be done by the Windows client. You can then just accept that data via Samba and pass it directly to the printer, usually via lpr.

However, it does take some doing to set up Samba and lpr correctly and to get your parallel port working and all. It might make sense to set up the printer directly on one of your Windows machines temporarily until you get whatever you need printed off immediately done, and then play with it. Regardless, I don't think it should take you more than a couple of hours to get it all set up right once you do.

There is a driver for the printserver in Windows. It shows up in your list of ports (LPT1, LPT2, etc.). It can also use the generic IP driver in Win2k.

That said, the normal printer driver works with it. Here's what the printer properties look like:

Fantastic ... this sounds like a good deal then.

Greg

Exactly. For the same reasons that it'll all work via Samba, it'll all also work via any of the various ethernet print servers available. So if money is not an issue, then you might as well go with one of the print servers. It'll certainly be easier.