LinuxTent

The Linux driver for Konica Minolta 7222 is not working for me, when I send the test page it gives 32 garbage page.

To solve the problem, you can:

1. Fix the konica driver
2. Install a virtual machine XP using virtualbox and connect it to the network printer using the windows driver. The printing process is slow according to the usage of the NAT service. To solve such low performance use Host adapter solution from virtualbox as a networking alternative to NAT service which asks you to make many changes including creating a new virtual bridge on your ubuntu host machine , for more details read this tutorial. Eventually your new virtual XP machine will appear as a new machine in the LAN so you can order printing requests as any other XP machine. Anyway, it is not east task especially that my network has strict administration rules which does not allow giving an unauthenticated machines an IP address
3. Use generic drivers. You can pick any one of many generic drivers available by default in ubuntu :
   1. go to System/Administration/printing or run the following command
      system-config-printer
   2. Choose new printer, you will get this dialog after searching for available printers
   

   new-printer dialog

   3. After choosing the IP address of your network printer, press forward to get the “choose driver” dialog.
   4. Choose Select Printer from database then for makes choose Generic. Press forward to get the following dialog
      

      Choose Driver dialog

   5. Most of the models are working, for me PCL 5, PCL 5e and PCL 6/PCL XL work for normal printing orders, for both sides printing option only PCL6/PCL XL works, after choosing the model choose the driver the best to choose is the recommended one.
   6. After that you have to fill the name and description fields, and Yupeee you have a new printer.
   7. Try printing a test page by choosing prosperities from right click menu.

   

   Go to Settings/Tests and Maintenance. Press print test page.

Both Sides printing Option

As I said before this option is not working smoothly with all the generic drivers even it is available in most of them. For example, my network printer supports both sides option, the PCL 5 driver also give the option from the printer properties dialog but it is disabled in the evince printing dialog. Moreover, adding the both sides option to the lpr command did not work with the PCL 5 generic driver, choosing PCL6/PCL XL solved the probelm.

To check if your driver provides both sides option:

1. Go to Your Printer Properties Dialog
2. Choose Printer Options
3. Go to Gutenprint Printer Features Common
4. Change the default setting to whatever you want

Providing the option of both sides does not mean that it is guaranteed to work, so to test the option, open any pdf you have using evince, and try the printing dialog. Go to the page setup tab if the both sides option is enabled this means that it is working, if it is disabled try another generic driver.

You can pass the both sides option to the lpr command in this way:
$ lpr -P NameofYourPrinter -o InputSlot=Standard -o Resolution=FromPrintoutMode -o PageSize=A4 -o sides=two-sided-long-edge -o page-ranges=3-4 nameofthefile

Once you have laser network printer without any upper limit, your appetite of reading will start to increase. Within one month my office converted to a mess of articles, papers, books, and problems. However, Wikipedia is still my favorite source of reading. In Wikipedia no more fear to read more about anything you want or you do not; everything is explained by clicking on the new term that frightened you. Wikiing becomes a trend which is being included in new and special gadgets like Kindle. Moreover, such luxury is not available everywhere and having Internet while you are in a bus is far from being achieved in the near future [at least in TRNC].

I searched for a long time for a solution to make Wikipedia printed articles more elegant and practical. For example, if you want to print the printable version of the USA article this will cost you 47 page ! Changing the printing font size in Firefox browser helps. However, the printed article structure is far from being elegant: you have many white space areas and a photo or table may occupy consecutive pages in ugly and scattered way.

Apparently, there is no available firefox addons that can change the style of wikipedia article to suitable format. I think CSS and the new web fonts can be in great help [I am not sure]. PediaPress made good efforts with Wikimedia to make a new extension that allow you to collect the articles you want to be printed in one pdf file. You can also order a printed copy from pediapress. This extension which is called [collection] or [wiki-to-print] is enabled in English Wikibooks, French, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Simple English wikipedias. According to scalability issues this extension is not available directly in English Wikipedia. You can use the extension in English Wikipedia in one of these ways:

1. Collection extension is available to logged in users of English Wikiepedia. Using this solution:
   USA artcile printed in 44 pages with images in one column , the file size is 8 MB.
2. Use the pedia button in the collection extension. Using this solution:
   USA article printed in 26 pages without images in one column. The file size is 581KB
   

Moreover, I found superior solution to print wikipedia articles. Prince provide neat conversion method for HTML, XML files that generates pdf files. The software is cross platform and has a cli. Running the following command generates a pdf file for the USA article in 28 pages with images in 2 columns. The file size is 1.3MB.

rami@rami-desktop:~$ prince --no-author-style
-s http://www.princexml.com/howcome2008/wikipedia/wiki2.css
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usa -o usa.pdf

I used the prince software to print the wikipedia article on Neural Networks. Once Shariq saw the output, he said it is like a conference paper. Mustafa replied that it is even in a better quality.