What is m2300w? --------------- The m2300w driver is an open source Linux driver for the Konica Minolta magicolor 2300W and 2400W color laser printers. The driver is basically intended for being used in conjunction with "foomatic" (see http://www.linuxprinting.org/foomatic.html), which is a database-driven system for integrating free software printer drivers with common spoolers under Unix, like CUPS, LPRng, LPD, GNUlpr, PPR, PDQ, CPS, and direct printing. Copyright and Licensing ----------------------- The m2300w driver is free software. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. Though we do our best to avoid that, there is a small residual risk, that the use of this driver may damage your printer. It is a fact, that laser printer engines CAN BE damaged if they are not driven appropriately (for instance, putting down far too much toner on the paper can actually contaminate or even damage the fuser, etc.). IN NO EVENT WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY MODIFY AND/OR REDISTRIBUTE THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING DAMAGES TO THE PRINTER), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. What's new in 0.5? ------------------ The m2300w driver now also supports the magicolor 2400W. Special thanks go to Thomas Rohringer for contributing the backend for the 2400W. What's new in 0.4? ------------------ Version 0.4 contains no new features. It only resolves the following bugs: - 1022300 Should not start CUPS automatically Now CUPS is only restarted, if it cupsd is running, thus avoiding the start of CUPS, if it was not running previously. - 1034790 m2300w does not work with gs 8.15 A workaround for the ghostscript problem http://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=687702 has been implemented. Now m2300w 0.4 now can be used in conjunction with the new ghostscript versions >= 8.15. What's new in 0.3? ------------------ This is the 3rd pre-release of the driver. * Reworked print modes - Added AutoColor mode, which detects pages containing only black text, and prints these pages in B/W, which is much faster, while color pages are still printed in color. - Added a Draft mode for saving toner - Recreated all color profiles - Added an option to specify how to interpret /DeviceRGB colors in the PostScript documents being printed - Added a "PrintoutMode" option for selecting the most common print modes with a single paramter * Improved checks for required prerequisites * Added workaround for several problems of gs 7.xx * Added full RPM build capability * The RPM now installs foomatic-rip, if missing on the system Installation ------------ Please refer to the instructions in the INSTALL file. Driver options -------------- Please refer to the foomatic documentation and/or your spooler's documentation, how to speficy driver options in conjunction with a particular spooler. For instance with CUPS, you can preset the default options for a particular printer queue in the "Configure Printer" dialog of the CUPS web interface, or you can also override individual options for one particular print job at the "lp" command line, like lp -d myprinter -o MediaType=Carton -o ColorProfile=Photo ... Options supported by the m2300w driver: PageSize ............ Select the page size. Default: A4 A4 .............. Select A4 paper. A5 .............. Select A5 paper. Legal ........... Select Legal paper. Letter .......... Select Letter paper. MediaType ........... Select the media type (analog to the Windows driver). According to the printer docs, for paper up to 90g/m2, use "Standard", for paper thicker than 90g/m2, use "Carton". Otherwise, use the type which corresponds to your medium. Selecting a wrong type may damage the fuser. Default: Standard Carton .......... Select "Carton" media type. Envelope ........ Select "Envelope" media type. Labels .......... Select "Labels" media type. Letterhead ...... Select "Letterhead" media type. Postcard ........ Select "Postcard" media type. Standard ........ Select "Standard" media type. Transparency .... Select "Transparency" media type. Multipage ........... Select the printing of several logical pages on a single sheet of paper (n-up printing). The program "psnup" needs to be installed on your system in order that you can use this feature. Default: none none ............ Disable n-up printing. 2up ............. Print two pages on one sheet. 4up ............. Print four pages on one sheet. PrintoutMode ........ Allows the selection of the most common print modes with a single option. Default: Auto Auto ............ Automatically detects pages containing black text only, and print such pages in B/W, all other pages are printed in color. Gray ............ Force printing in grayscale. Photo ........... Print in color using the "Photo" color profile. Draft ........... Economy mode to save toner, approx. newspaper quality. Draft.Gray ...... Grayscale economy mode. Quality ............. Selects the print quality. Default: @PrintoutMode @PrintoutMode ... Controlled by PrintoutMode Normal .......... Normal print quality. Draft ........... Economy mode to save toner. The option ColorProfile is ignored with Quality=Draft - there exists only a single color profile for draft mode. ColorMode ........... Selects B/W or color printing Default: @PrintoutMode @PrintoutMode ... Controlled by PrintoutMode Gray ............ Force printing in grayscale Color ........... Print in color ColorProfile ........ Select the color profile (CRD) to use. The included color profiles have been made for "Premium Choice Laser Paper" CHP410, using the "MediaType=Carton" option, and therefore will give the best color reproduction on this paper brand. However, the profiles work reasonalby well for other paper types too (e.g. normal copier paper). The option ColorProfile is ignored in conjunction with "Quality=Draft", there exists only a single color profile for draft mode. Default: @PrintoutMode @PrintoutMode ... Controlled by PrintoutMode AutoColor ....... Automatically detects pages containing black text only, and print such pages in B/W, all other pages are printed in color. This slightly impacts the darkness of black and dark colors, since black is printed with black toner only. Photo ........... Optimized for printing photos, produces deep, dark colors. The black generation uses as much black toner as possible. Photo-kh ........ Another profile optimized for printing photos. The black generation uses less black toner than 'Photo'. The 'Photo' mode will give more neutral grayscales, but for some images, 'Photo-kh' may look more pleasing. Judge yourself and choose the photo mode you like better. None ............ Turn off CIE-based color matching. This setting is useful, if you want to print test charts for making your own color profiles using 3rd party software. It is rather not useful otherwise. User[1-5] ....... User defined CRD #1-5. This settings requires that you supply your self-made CRD files as /usr/share/m2300w//psfiles/User[1-5].crd DefRGB .............. This option defines, how /DeviceRGB colors in printed PostScript documents are interpreted, i.e. which RGB color space is assumed for these RGB colors. (Actually I wanted to call this option "DefaultRGB" to comply with the PostScript terminology, but CUPS does not like option names starting with the prefix "Default") Default: sRGB sRGB ............ IEC 61966-2.1 Default RGB colour space - sRGB AdobeRGB ........ Adobe RGB (1998) gimp-print ...... Use this setting if you are printing an sRGB image from gimp (using the File->Print dialog). Unfortunately, gimp mangles the image colors during printing, and using this option setting attempts to compensate for that. builtin ......... Does not install a CSA for DefaultRGB, but use Ghostscript's builtin default (which is rather unspecific, since it is not documented which color space ghostscript assumes by default). Debug ............... Select the debug level. Default: off off ............. Turn off debugging output. 1 ............... Select debug level 1. 2 ............... Select debug level 2. 3 ............... Select debug level 3. Ghostscript issues ------------------ Please refer to README.ghostscript or to http://m2300w.sourceforge.net/gs/ Restrictions ------------ * Currently only the high (1200x600) resolution is supported * Color profiles need to be revised for grayscale printing * There is no status monitor available, see (1) * Printing with the Duplex Unit is not supported, see (1) * Replacing consumables (toner) is not supported by the driver, but needs to be done under Windows, see (1) * In order to recover from an error condition (yellow error lamp on the printer) it is mostly necessary to cancel the print job and to turn the printer off, and then on again after a short pause, see (1). An exception is "out of paper", in this case you just need to refill the paper tray, and then the print job will continue. * DO NOT press the "Cancel" button on the printer, otherwise the printer will end up in an error condition (yellow lamp), see (1) * DO NOT submit print jobs while the printer is turned off or while the printer is still warming up, otherwise either your print job will be lost, or the printer may even end up in an error condition (yellow lamp), see (1) On the other hand, it is not a problem to submit a new print job when the printer has entered energy saving mode. The printer wakes up, when the new job arrives, see (1) Footnote (1): It is not likely that this restriction can be removed in the near future, since this would require bidirectional communication with the printer and decoding/reverse-engneering of the protocol spoken between the driver and the printer. Debugging and reporting problems of the m2300w driver ----------------------------------------------------- Please report problems at http://sourceforge.net/projects/m2300w/ For debugging purposes, m2300w-wrapper creates the following file in your /tmp directory: - /tmp/m2300w.log If a debug level >= 2 is selected, additionally the following files are created: - /tmp/m2300w_gsout.pbm - /tmp/m2300w.prn Please always attach /tmp/m2300w.log to your bug report. Please also save /tmp/m2300w_gsout.pbm and /tmp/m2300w.prn, since we might need them for the diagnosis of your problem. If we need these files, we'll let you know. But don't attach them a priori to the bug report, since these files are VERY LARGE. IMPORTANT SECURITY ADVISORY: /tmp/m2300w_gsout.pbm and /tmp/m2300w.prn contain the data of your last print job. Do not send them, if your print job did contain confident data. CUPS debugging: If there are problems in conjunction with CUPS, it can be useful to turn on CUPS debugging by setting "LogLevel debug" in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf. It is necessary to restart CUPS after modifying this file. The debugging output will appear in /var/log/cups/error_log.