Topic: How do I print to the E-smith printer

[John Batstone]

How do I print to the E-smith printer from the console
I have a Lexmark 2380+ dot mat tracktor printer attached to the esmith printer port
I want to be able to print to this printer from the esmith console.
I set the printer up for windows sharing in the esmith web interface, works fine.
I just want to print text from the esmith console.

[Jason Miller]

Hi John,

   If its just a text document you wish to print, then you can use the 'lpr' from the command line.  

   Just to clarify terminology, by 'esmith console' I immediately think the text mode administrative tool you login with as 'admin'.  There is no direct link to printing from the 'console'.  From the command line (login as root) you can do many additional linux options, including using the lpr command.

   If you wish to print your document (mydoc.txt) from the command line, just type:

lpr mydoc.txt

   To find out other options for lpr (eg. in case you have more than one printer and therefore need to specify which), you can view the manual pages for lpr by typing this on the command line:

man lpr

   Hope that helps,

   Jason

[John Batstone]

Thanks for your response
I'm getting this message:

Status Information:
sending job 'root@e-smith+15' to missingprinter@localhost
connecting to 'localhost', attempt 1
connected to 'localhost'
requesting printer missingprinter@localhost
error 'LINK_TRANSFER_FAIL' sending str '^Bmissingprinter' to missingprinter@localhost
job 'root@e-smith+15 transfer to missingprinter@localhost failed


How come?

[Jason Miller]

This is my fault.  I responded without thinking about the e-smith server setup.  Unfortunately printing directly off the server is not a supported e-smith feature as lpr is printer dependant.  It takes custom modification.  I'm just used to being able to running 'lpr' here myself thinking it just worked out of the box.  The problem in your case is dealing with delivery of the print job to the specified printer.

The best solution is to actually generate your document on the server in an ibay and then print like normal.  If the file already exists on the server, you can copy it to an ibay instead.

Otherwise you have to get into learning stuff about "printer smartfilters" which I haven't the foggiest idea how to go about doing or where to start researching.

Hope the temporary solution of the ibay document works for you and sorry for leading down the wrong path.

Jason