Adding or Updating Printer Drivers

A printer driver is a software entity that directly supports a physical printer, enabling it to carry out the functions it is intended to perform.

Hardware vendors develop printer drivers, which are specific to each printer. Most printers require different printer drivers for each operating system they interact with. Novell® Distributed Print ServicesTM (NDPSTM) allows you to view a complete list of printer drivers currently loaded in the Broker's Resource Management Service for Windows* 95*, Windows NT*, and Windows 3.x, and to add additional printer drivers.

NOTE:  NDPS ships with only English-language drivers. To make drivers in other languages available for installation on workstations, you will first need to add those drivers to the RMS through the procedure described in this section.

NOTE:  While the majority of printer drivers in common use today can be used with NDPS, some cannot. A few drivers do not work on a network at all, while others may not contain an index file or have an index file that is incorrectly formatted. If you attempt to add a printer driver to the Resource Management Service from a diskette through NetWare® Administrator and receive an error message stating that a printer driver cannot be found, you might need to contact the driver's vendor.


Prerequisite

Printer drivers cannot be installed to the Resource Management Service from multiple floppy disks. If a printer driver is shipped on more than one disk, copy the files to a directory on a hard drive or network drive and install the driver from there.


Procedure

  1. Make sure the Resource Management Service is enabled.

  2. In NetWare® Administrator, select the Broker object and double-click it.

    The main Broker Details window appears.

  3. Select the Resource Management tab.

    The Resource Service dialog appears.

  4. Click the Add Resources button.

    The Manage Resources dialog appears.

  5. Select the icon for the type of printer driver you want to add.

    A complete list of currently loaded printer drivers of that type appears in the Current Resources window.

  6. To add a driver to the list, click the Add button.

    The Add Printer Driver dialog appears.

  7. Provide the required information and follow the prompts.

    Refer to the online help for detailed information.

NOTE:  The process described above may not work if the driver installation file (.inf extension) uses subdirectory paths in filename designations within the "copy files" sections of the .inf file. This format is not currently supported by NDPS. There are two possible work-arounds for this problem:

a. Look for an .inf file that does not use this format for filenames. Often one may exist in a subdirectory of the installation disk.
b. Edit the .inf file and remove path information from file names. Then ensure that all the files are in the same directory as the .inf file.