While I had military service about 6 years ago, my parent’s printer died and they went to the local retailer of Minolta to get a new one. When I came home I saw a brand new PagePro 1100L … as I had feared: GDI, so no chance to get it work with GNU/Linux, BSD, whatever system that isn’t Windows.
Now my parents are finally considering to get a new computer as a replacement for their nine year old AMD K6-200MMX. Since I’m not really motivated to help them with Windows problems, I’m currently on a small campaign to convince them to get a Mac. As a first task (at least for me) I wanted to get the Minolta printer to somehow work inside of a network. Therefor I simply wanted to first of all, get it to work with Windows XP. Well … there are drivers hidden somewhere on the Minolta server, but they are more or less useless as for every successful print you get one error message saying, that the cover of the printer is open while it isn’t.
So printing via WindowsXP is not really an option anymore. The other problem is, that - from what I understand about CUPS - the CUPS server has to have the driver for the printer shared by the Windows machine. Very funny!
The only solution I could come up with for now (and that at least would work in my head) is writing a small server script for the Windows machine to poll a certain folder and print everything that hasn’t been printed yet … yeah, stupid idea, but it should at least work.
If someone has a better idea where I could simply share the Windows printer to a Linux server but let the sharing Windows machine handle the printing process, I’m all ear :)
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