Line printers will normally accept text mode input as-is, as they print individual letters directly. But laser printers need to turn everything into a bitmap image for the laser to transfer it onto the paper.
Low-end laser printers (like LaserJet P1102) may not have the hardware/firmware facilities to turn text into an image of a page of text, and instead will rely on the host PC to do it instead. (This is known as "host-based printing" or "Winprinter".)
The resulting bitmap may even be in a proprietary format, which can be produced by the vendor drivers only (unless successfully reverse-engineered). Apparently Windows LPD server is not capable of that: probably the Windows printer driver for this printer expects only whatever format(s) current Windows versions use internally.
The openprinting.org printer database identifies the Linux support level for this printer as Paperweight, indicating that there was no open-source printing solution for this printer model at the time the entry was created. However, HP's specifications page for this model indicates that Linux support from HP does seem to exist.
So hplib
with its dependencies might be the only way to support this printer in Linux. Just having a PPD file is not enough: the CUPS PPD file will specify the necessary tools to convert a bitmap image or a PS/PDF print job to the format required by the printer, but you'll also need the actual tools... which I guess would be provided by hplib
and its dependencies.
Get yourself a DVD media for RHEL 6.x (6.10 if allowed by client's policy, or appropriate version if not), or just an ISO image of one. You will easily be able to mount it and use it as a local package repository for yum
, see this public RHEL support document for instructions.
In a nutshell:
Once you've mounted the DVD or ISO image to some filesystem location, you'll need a .repo
file to indicate its availability as a repository for yum
. The necessary contents of such a .repo
file will be:
[InstallMedia]
name=DVD for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
mediaid=<NNNNNNNNNN.NNNNNN>
metadata_expire=-1
gpgcheck=1
cost=500
enabled=1
baseurl=file://<full pathname of the mount point>
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-redhat-release
Replace <NNNNNNNNNN.NNNNNN>
with a media ID you can find in a .discinfo
file at the root of the DVD/image, and <full pathname of the mount point>
with the full pathname of the mount point of the DVD/image. Then place the resulting file as /etc/yum.repos.d/<name of your choice>.repo
.
On some RHEL versions, there will be a prepared bare-bones media.repo
file at the root directory of the DVD/image to simplify this process. You'll need to add the last 3 lines to it.
Finally run yum clean all
, and now you can use yum
as if you had a connection to a RHEL repository. You may have to use the --noplugins
option with yum
to avoid delays associated with attempts to contact RedHat network servers.