I got a Rollo thermal label printer working with Bluefin

[passthejoe]

I think I've been on Bluefin this whole year, and it's pretty telling that I haven't blogged about it a lot. That's mostly because my posts are generally focused on how I solved a particular problem, and I have had almost no Bluefin problems. It very much "just works."

But here's something: I bought a Rollo thermal label printer, and I thought it would be nice to get it working with Bluefin. The driver isn't in CUPS, and Atomic Linux isn't a place where you can install downloaded RPMs (at least not for system-level functionality), or bring in external PPD files (as far as I know).

tl;dr, The "secret" is using the Zebra EPL2 Label Printer driver, which is in CUPS, and then messing with the scaling until things came out the right size.

The details are in this blog post.

If anybody has any better ideas on getting external PPDs into Bluefin, I'd like to hear about it, but for now, my hack is working.

[castrojo]

Couldn't this be copied into /usr/local and /etc?

[passthejoe]

When using https://localhost:631/admin/ or GNOME's Settings => Printers to add a printer, it will pick up a PPD file from anywhere, but it tries to create files in various folders under /usr/share/cups, and I don't know how to get either of these two utilities to write to those locations.

If anybody has a way to install a printer with external PPDs in current Bluefin, I'd like to know your secret.

[passthejoe]

I asked Dosu ... let's see what the machine comes up with.