Does anyone have a free solution to running windows printer drivers in linux? The best I could come up with for my Canon printer is to run Windows 98 (basically free; don't we all still have abandoned windows 98 cds deep in the back of our closet?) in a vmware-player window, networked with CUPS. When I need to print, I open vmware, which resumes my previously suspended windows installation. Then when I print normally, after which I close vmware, suspending my windows installation. I have it set up for this to happen automatically: 1.Cups sends a postscript file to my win98 installation's shared "Apple" printer. 2.Windows prints the .ps file through the Apple LW postscript driver, whose output is captured by Redmon. 3.Redmon directs this output to ghostscript, which then prints on my Canon printer through a virtual USB port. 4.Vmware directs this USB stream to my real usb port, connected to my real printer. Although this does work 100% of the time, it is awfully kludgy, and a very very silly use for an old windows 98 license. Does anyone have a better way?

if your printer supports post script then you should be able to use it directly in linux with a postscript driver.

try ibm omni print

http://omniprint.sourceforge.net/

Thanks, but my printer doesn't support postscript. That's why I needed ghostscript to interpret postscript commands. By using Redmon and ghostscript, I can make a non-postscript printer appear on a network as postscript, letting it be used by unix.

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/redmon/index.htm

Sorry, I wasn't logged in. The above post was (obviously) me.

I'm afraid you are out of luck. I used to use the exact same hack for my LBP-660 until someone finally reverse-engineered the protocol and wrote drivers. Maybe Wine or ReactOS will some day be able to use Windows printer drivers directly.

Which Canon printer is it btw? If it's an LBP-600 or LBP-800, which linuxprinting.org lists as "paperweight", maybe it could be made to work with this.

Actually, my printer is just a junky canon i320. I got it to print out school work, but when I started using Linux more than Windows, it got annoying as hell to reboot just to print something. So when vmware player came out, I hacked up this ugly windows-for-printing setup. Now the only reason I reboot is for games!