Foomatic PPDs now in EasyOS

Forum member 'williwaw' asked about Foomatic PPD printer drivers:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=22844#p22844

...his post has a link to another post, reporting "filter failure". I don't know about that, however a first step will be to put all the PPDs into EasyOS.

I previously thought that I had to install 'foomatic-db-engine' and 'foomatic-db' to get the PPDs, however, Debian has a DEB with them already extracted, named 'foomatic-db-compressed-ppds' -- which does not require the previous two DEBs.

There is a package 'foomatic-filters', which provides an executable 'foomatic-rip', however, 'cups-filters' provides that executable. So also, 'foomatic-filters' is not required.

Debian info for 'foomatic-db-compressed-ppds':

https://packages.debian.org/sid/foomatic-db-compressed-ppds

This has a driver /usr/lib/cups/driver/foomatic-db-compressed-ppds, which is a python3 script with the PPDs encoded in it.

We don't really need the PPDs in compressed form, as the file is in 'easy.sfs' which is a compressed squashfs file -- so have double compression, which actually has the reverse effect of what you would expect, makes the file a bit bigger, as well as slows down access.

Yep, these drivers all automagically appear when the CUPS Wizard is run (Setup menu).

So Easy now has heaps more printer drivers, in addition to those offered by Gutenprint.   Don't know about the "filter failure", but we shall see -- expect 2.7.1 soon.

EDIT:
Feodor sent me an email with a fix for the "filter failure". The 'ghostscript' package has /etc/cups/pstoraster.convs with this line in it:

application/vnd.cups-postscript	application/vnd.cups-raster	100	pstoraster

...and 'pstoraster' is supposed to be in /usr/lib/cups/filter, but it isn't. However, there is 'gstoraster', from the 'cups-filters' package. Feodor has advised, just change the text "pstoraster" to "gstoraster" in that 'pstoraster.convs' file, fixes the printing.

I just looked in Easy Buster, seems to have the same situation, but printing works in Buster? Well, printing works for me in Dunfell also, without that above fix.

There must be situations where the missing 'pstoraster' is causing a failure, so this fix is good, will be in the next Easy.       

Tags: easy