This page contains what I did to get my HL-1250 printer to work with CUPS on OpenBSD-4.0 on a Sun Blade 100.
To check if GhostScript contains the needed driver, run gs -h and look for hl1250. If it is not there you will probably have compile it from the ports tree. The tree supplied with OpenBSD 4.0 did not contain it so I updated the ports tree from cvs (cirka 2007-01-01). ports/print/ghostscript/gnu/ then contained ghostscript-8.54 which does not seem to be the gnu version. Gnu-GhostScript v8.55 does contain the driver (look at the Makefile to determine which version it will install since it could have changed since).
This patch patches the v8.54p0 port so that it will include the hl1250 driver. To apply the patch, go to /usr/ports and type:
ftp -o - http://www.df.lth.se/~pi/hl1250/openbsd_gs_gnu_hl1250.patch.gz| gunzip | patch -p0
Hopefully sometime the port will use the real gnu GhostScript so that this problem will disappear.
After I set up the printer using the web interface of cup and tried to print a test-page, the printer switched on and off without printing anything and dmesg was full of messages like these:
ulpt0: Brother Industries product 0x0007, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 4, iclass 7/1 ulpt0: using bi-directional mode ulpt0: at uhub0 port 4 (addr 4) disconnected ulpt0 detached ulpt0 at uhub0 port 4 configuration 1 interface 0 ulpt0: Brother Industries product 0x0007, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 4, iclass 7/1 ulpt0: using bi-directional mode ulpt0: at uhub0 port 4 (addr 4) disconnected ulpt0 detached
I solved this by doing the following:
sudo mknod /dev/unlpt0 c 93 64
which means "Do not initialize the device on the port." according to man ulpt. I also had to edit /etc/cups/printers.conf manually to be able to choose /dev/unlpt0 as the port to print to.
In cups-1.2.7 it is possible to choose the non-resetting port during normal configuration with the browser.
Per Ola Ingvarsson, 2007-01-14 skrabban gmail com