\jeff{krimmel}

D-Link DP-301U Print Server and Fedora

Today saw the end of a long, though intermittent, struggle between me and my lab’s USB print server (the D-Link DP-301U). Back in the summer some time, one of my lab mates bought a print server and a small Epson Stylus C84 color printer to replace our old color printer that had died. From the get go, I struggled to find a way to get the print server to play nicely with the Fedora Core machines in the lab (some machines run Fedora Core 3, others run Fedora Core 4).

I finally put the pieces together today, after having dropped the issue several months ago. I navigated to the CUPS web interface at http://localhost:631. I clicked “Manage Printers” and then clicked “Add Printer” at the bottom of the screen. After supplying the root username and password, I was shown the “Name”, “Location”, and “Description” fields. I typed the informal name of the printer into the “Name” field, left the other fields blank, and clicked “Continue”.

I was now asked to select a “Device”, and I chose LPD/LPR Host or Printer and then clicked “Continue”. For the “Device URI”, I provided the full name of the printer, followed by the port name. You can get the port name from the print server’s configuration web page. Navigate to this page, click on the “Configuration” tab, and under “Port Setting” you should find the “Port Name” field. The port name for my print server was PS-10104A-U1. So, in the “Device URI” field, I entered lpd://printername.domain.com/PS-10104A-U1, and then I clicked “Continue”.

Next, I had to provide the “Make” of the printer. From this point forward is where my efforts had gone awry previously. I needed to have the gimp-print-cups package installed, and until today I did not. With this package installed, I could choose EPSON for the “Make”, and after clicking “Continue”, I selected EPSON Stylus C84 - CUPS+Gimp-Print v4.2.7 (en) for the “Model”. Clicking “Continue” completed the process.

And I can now print to the newly installed color printer with a command as simple as lpr -P printername file. All is well in the world of lab printing.