USB printer, USB card and sharing it over a LAN

[Geert Janssens]

Eric D wrote:
> Alright, I have a three plus one part question re network printing and 
> USB PCI cards:
> 
> I have a PowerMac G3 Beige 266 MHz (Rev B) running YDL 3.0.1 as a server 
> (http, ftp, ssh, Samba at the moment, and WebDAV, nfs and atalk in the 
> near) and would like to turn it into a print server for my USB Canon 
> i550 inkjet. This will require me to add a USB PCI card to the Beige G3.
> 
> 1. Is it possible to use any old USB PCI card to add USB support to a 
> PowerMac G3 Beige or does it have to be a specific one? If specific, is 
> there a list of supported cards anywhere? (or, does anyone have 
> suggestions)?
> 
There are apparently two types of USB cards: OHCI (Open Host Controller 
Interface) compliant or UHCI (Universal Host Controller Interface) 
compliant. Macs are designed to work with the first (OHCI), so look for 
such a card.
Personally, in my beige PM G3 233 (Rev A) I added a Keyspan USB (1.x) 
card. It has worked flawlessly. The default kernel recognised it.

> 2. Can you hook up a printer (Canon i550) to the USB card and print to 
> it from YDL?
> 
Should be possible. Cups is your friend, together with foomatic and the 
linuxprinting.org website.

> 3. Is it possible to network the printer such that Mac users running OS 
> X (and, perhaps 9) can print to it?
> 
Since OS X also uses cups, this should be possible. You could setup your 
print server to accept connection via the IPP protocol, and configure OS 
X to print to a network printer via IPP. If OS 9 can do this as well, 
I'm not sure.

> Ideally the printer driver would support the fake 'duplex' option of the 
> Canon i550's printer driver but I suppose that's not going to be likely 
> (the Canon driver automagically prints the one side, and then the 
> software tells you when to take the pages and insert them into the 
> printer again for the 2nd side).
> 
Check the linuxprinting.org website to see which features are supported.

> 3+1. Would it be possible to run OS X under MOL in order to provide 
> network printing services?
> 
I don't think the USB ports are forwarded inside MOL, but I'm not sure. 
If the ports are not forwarded, you won't be able to use OS X inside MOL 
as your print server, otherwise, this is theoretically possible, but not 
so easy.

I think setting up YDL+cups will work better.

Good luck.

Geert