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Installing Printers With CUPS and the Solaris 10 8/07 OS for x86 Platforms

Vinod Hingorani, January 2008

My goal was to set up a monochromatic laser printer (for example, the Brother HL-2040) on the Solaris 10 8/07 Operating System for x86 platforms (not Solaris Express Developer Edition). I ran into several problems, even after using information from several excellent Internet resources. If your printer is supported out of the box with the existing drivers supplied in the Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS) packages, which are on the companion CD for the Solaris 10 OS, then you are in luck. Otherwise, certain files may be missing or the paths might not be not set, so read on.

Note: The following procedure assumes you did a complete Solaris 10 installation.

1. Follow the excellent blog by Dan Anderson, Using CUPS Print Server for Solaris 10, completely, bit by bit, byte by byte.

Note: Make sure you install CUPS in opt/sfw/cups.

If your printer works, don't read further.

2. Look for your printer-specific PostScript Printer Descriptions (PPDs) in /usr/lib/lp/model/ppd/system/foomatic/. Copy the PPDs you want to /opt/sfw/cups/share/cups/model/.

The Brother HL-2060 PPD worked fine for my Brother HL-2040 printer.

3. Download foomatic-rip and foomatic-gswrapper scripts from the Internet, for example, from the Linux Foundation's OpenPrinting/Database/Foomatic page.

4. Copy foomatic-rip and foomatic-gswrapper to /opt/sfw/cups/lib/cups/filter/, and then use chmod to set the permissions for both files to 755 in the target directory.

5. Edit foomatic-rip to add the ghostscript path, which is /usr/sfw/bin in the Solaris 10 OS.

Note: This assumes that the ghostscript interpreter gs is installed in /usr/sfw/bin.

my $execpath = "NONE/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sfw/bin";

Alternatively, you can do the following:

a. Edit the $execpath variable as shown in step 5.

b. Add /usr/sfw/bin to the PATH when you perform the "Enabling CUPS" instructions in Dan's blog in step 1.

6. Restart the CUPS daemon:

# /etc/init.d/cupsd restart

7. Log out and log back in and check that gs can be started from your home directory (in the shell). Also check that using the echo $PATH command shows all the PATH changes.

8a. Log in to the CUPS administration page (using localhost:631), and then install your printer, using the steps outlined in Dan's web blog (in step #1).

8b. Print a test page from the CUPS web page (using localhost:631). Documentation on how to do this is available on the Internet.

9. If you need to troubleshoot a problem, set the debug mode to debug2 in cupsd.conf to figure out what works and does not work. That's how I got to this stage.

Editor's note: This information appeared previously on the Sun Solaris Developer forum.

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