[ale] network printing

Elijah Underwood elijahu at mindspring.com
Tue Jun 23 11:11:19 EDT 1998


Okay, my first question to the collective.

I'm using my Linux box here at work. We have a Novell based LAN (which I
supposedly help support). I've managed to successfully write little
scripts that use Linux's netWare connectivity features to allow me
access to the couple of Novell fileservers I use as well as to the
printer in my office, which has a que on one of the Novell servers. For
now, when I want to print something, I have two options. One: if what
I want to print is in a software package like Applix, I just have it
print to a postscript file locally. Then, in a shell I issue my script
command with the postscript filename and voila, it all goes through to
the printer. If I want to print something that is text or standard
output, I use a different script, which takes a file, formats it using
"a2ps" and then sends it too the printer. I am not unhappy with these
solutions, but I'm wondering if there isn't a more elegant way to make
it happen, at least from a program like Applix. I don't mind opening a
shell, but if I were to try to get one of my "win95 adjusted" users to
do something like that (not that they will ever come into contact with
Linux, mind you) they would balk.

Any suggestions?






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