Installing captdriver on GNU Linux

Prerequisites

If you have not completed Stage 2, Downloading and compiling captdriver, which prepares ready-to-use driver binaries and printer description files, please complete that stage before proceeding. You should be able to find a suitable guide to do this with the unified guide.

Installation

As the superuser, run these commands in order from the source tree's root directory:

make install
cp -p /usr/local/bin/rastertocapt $(cups-config --serverbin)/filter/

The make install command above only copies the rastertocapt binary to the /usr/local/bin directory, while setting the necessary file ownerships and permissions. The cp command is still needed to place a copy of rastertocapt inside the CUPS filter directory.

Leave the .ppd files for now, as they will only be used in Stage 4 of the installation, CUPS daemon configuration. Return to the unified guide and pick the right guide for your operating system.

Notes

The $(cups-config --serverbin) command expands to the full (absolute) path to the CUPS directory. Although /usr/lib/cups/ seems to be a popular choice by a wide margin, this command is used, just in case the location of the CUPS directory is different from expected.

For security reasons, CUPS will only run filters that are owned by the root user with read-and-execute-only permissions to all other users.

References

File Permissions. Filter and Backend Programming. CUPS Documentation. https://www.cups.org/doc/api-filter.html#PERMISSIONS Accessed 2020-04-15

Captdriver Issue #7