Can I use Windows or Mac printer drivers in Puppy ?

What works, and doesn't, for you. Be specific, and please include Puppy version.
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Billwho?
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Can I use Windows or Mac printer drivers in Puppy ?

#1 Post by Billwho? »

I recall reading on another post that Barry was able to get his wireless network card (wifi???? i'm very green about most abreviations :oops:) to work by using the win XP driver supplied by with the card. Is there some way I could do the the same sort of thing to get my wifes 'You Beaut' All in one printer scanner copier to work? Or possibly using the MacOS drivers, I heard somewhere that it is very similar to Linux. I know the odds are rather long or Linux as whole would not be plagued by this printing problem but I think there are minds better able to assess this than mine and it is at least worth thinking about.

saintlangton
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#2 Post by saintlangton »

Hi Billwho?

The reason Barry (and lots of other linux users including myself) can use windows drivers to make wireless networking (wifi) work is that there is a project called "ndiswapper". This project makes software that enables many windows wifi drivers to work in linux. I'm not aware of any comparable project for printers. In fact I doubt it is even feasible. sorry.

you could have a look at http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Printing-HOWTO/printers.html about printers on linux.

All-in-one printer/scanners are notoriously difficult with linux. From what I've read on the net sometimes they can be coaxed into printing but I've not heard of anyone getting both printing and scanning to work. OTOH I've not listened that hard... DOH! - Just googled and found this: http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=04/ ... d=7&tid=99 - I guess some of them can be made to work. :oops:

If you give exact make and name of printer someone may be able to help you get it working. Good Luck!

see http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/ for more info on ndiswrapper

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Billwho?
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#3 Post by Billwho? »

saintlangton wrote:The reason Barry (and lots of other linux users including myself) can use windows drivers to make wireless networking (wifi) work is that there is a project called "ndiswapper". This project makes software that enables many windows wifi drivers to work in linux. I'm not aware of any comparable project for printers. In fact I doubt it is even feasible. sorry.
Thanks for the headsup saintlangton.
Thats pretty well what I thought might be the case, But then nothing ventured nothing gained.Thanks also for the links, will be giving them a closer look as soon as I finish here
saintlangton wrote:All-in-one printer/scanners are notoriously difficult with linux. From what I've read on the net sometimes they can be coaxed into printing but I've not heard of anyone getting both printing and scanning to work. OTOH I've not listened that hard... DOH! - Just googled and found this: http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=04/ ... d=7&tid=99 - I guess some of them can be made to work. :oops:

If you give exact make and name of printer someone may be able to help you get it working. Good Luck!
Printer is a HP PSC 1410. I have managed to track down a driver (HPLIP) on HP's site (at least thats where I think it is :?, I started at HP got sent to sourceforge.net, then after several links on their pages wound up on what looked like one of HP's pages to make the download.) but the instalation information given was for
* Redhat Fedora
* Mandrake 10
* SUSE 9.2
* SUSE 9.0
* Debian
as far as I can work out none of the above are relevant to me. On top of this cups is a required element. Oh well at least I know that Flash has a couple of post about installing cups so I might get somewhere yet :P One other advantage if I can get this driver to work is that according to the information at sourceforge.net this driver will also allow scanning. :D

OTOH :?: That ones new on me, whats it short for?

Thanks again

Rich
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#4 Post by Rich »

OTOH = on the other hand 8)
>> Puppy 1.0.4 Moz - LiveCD <<

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MU
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#5 Post by MU »

There is an alternative, but untested driver.
I compiled it without scanner-support, as I did not have the source for the sane-backend.
But before one thinks about scanning, it first would be interesting to see, if printing works.

http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?p=26579#26579

Mark

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Billwho?
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#6 Post by Billwho? »

Thanks for the link Mark, which, although I didn't use your driver led me to Rarsa's Cups post.
I owe an apology to both Flash and Rarsa, it was Rarsa's post on installing Cups I was thinking of not Flash's (I'm not even sure that Flash has a post on that subject now ) :oops: sorry for any confusion. Anyway after several problems, including the death of my mother board (hence this very late reply) I have managed to get printing to work using Rarsa's HPIJS driver. I tried the HPLIP driver I downloaded first but the configuration did not complete due to missing files (dependacies ?) (I think they are probably for the scanning side of things). I wil continue to try and get scanning to work but at least now I can Print.:D

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