Although I don't really print much, it's been frustrating not being able to print from my Macs and Unix boxen to my HP DeskJet 882C color printer. A couple weeks ago, I finally got around to buying a print server, and today I finally got around to installing it. Although I was ultimately successful, I ran into a few SNAFUs, so I thought I'd cover them here.

The Print Server

I bought a Hawking Technology H-PS1U USB print server. It's tiny -- about 2" square. It has a power port, an ethernet port, and a USB port, and a couple of status lights. That's it. Luckily it has a web interface, so you don't really require a Windows machine to configure it. I used 'arp' to gain access to it as follows:

arp -s 90.0.0.200 aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff
# where aa:bb... is the MAC address of the H-PS1U,
# which is on the bar-code label pasted on the unit

(I got that bit of knowledge from the August 2003 MacWorld). Once the IP address was mapped, I could access the print server at http://90.0.0.200 and finish configuring its IP settings.

Windows Configuration

My wife is the tree-killer of the family, so I had to ensure that Windows printing worked before doing anything else. After a few (OK, a lot of) false starts, I found the Hawking Users Manual PDF file on the CD-ROM (the printed one is worthless). I followed the instructions there to configure a network-bound LPT port on the Windows box. From there, it was easy, and it worked fine in a few minutes.

Mac Configuration

Mac configuration was a bit more problematic, but not super-painful. I'm ignorant of both Mac and Unix print subsystem operation, so this was a real learning experience. Anyway, the MacWorld article mentioned that gimp-print and GhostScript would be necessary, so I downloaded and installed them.

The gimp-print users guide led me to believe that a) there would be a driver for my printer, and b) I'd be able to pick it from the Print Center's setup menus. Wrong on both counts. I ended up using the web-based CUPS setup because of this. It turned out to be super simple, after some trial and error. In CUPS I created an LPD printer (also based on trial-and-error) pointed to lpd://90.0.0.200. I had many more drivers to choose from in CUPS than I did in Print Center, but I still couldn't find one for the 882C. So I used trial-and-error until I found a driver that was close enough (810C). This technique involved wasting a lot of paper on test prints until I got good-looking output.