hackcu-printing.txt

If you are using Linux, like me, you may have been frustrated by the lack of 
documentation for adding printers from Columbia's Ninja printing system to your 
computer. Well, this post will show you an easy-peasy way to set up printing on 
your Linux system. As an added bonus, this method should work on Mac OS X 
as well!

Downloading:

Get the script from https://raw.github.com/adicu/ninja-unix/master/addprinters.sh. 

Adding Printers:

Running the script like so,

    sudo ./addprinters.sh 

without any arguments will add all the printers in the NINJA system to your 
computer. This will take a long time, so you may only want to add a subset. 
You can supply an argument to the script to restrict the printers installed. 
For instance.

    ./addprinters.sh butler

will add all printers in Butler library.

   ./addprinters.sh butler301a

adds a specific printer. 

Deleting printers:

To delete a specific printer, run the command

    lpadmin -x printername

where printername is the name of the printer. Alternatively, you can use the 
CUPS web interface by navigating to http://localhost:631 in your webbrowser 
and removing the printer from there.

If you need to delete many printers at once. You can use the delprinters.sh
script, available at https://raw.github.com/adicu/ninja-unix/master/addprinters.sh. 
The usage is the same as the addprinters.sh script.
 

Printing from the Command Line:

You may be thinking: "I'm a Linux user dammit, how do I print from the command line".

This is easy enough, just do

    lpr -d printername filename

Where printername is the name of the NINJA printer and filename is the name of a PostScript, PDF, or Image File.

Possible problems:

If you see the error message "Could not find the lpadmin program", you do not have the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) installed. In most distributions, CUPS can be found in a package called, well "cups".

If you see the message "Could not find foomatic-ppdfile", you do not have the foomatic database installed. Foomatic is a database containing the driver information for many different printer types. In most distros, foomatic is generally composed of two packages "foomatic-db" and "foomatic-db-engine". 

If you see "lpadmin: could not read ppd file", something may have gone wrong during installation, delete the printer and try again.