Or how to extract blood from a stone, linux style.
Ok. The generic windows PPD for the Xerox 7855 doesn’t quite do what we want. The linux install on the xerox page seems to require you to set up queues and use a xerox-supplied print command. A non-starter. But there is a driver package for Macs too. That should have a PPD in it, since Macs default to CUPS. Ok lets try to extract that.
1. Download a .dmg file – find out that you can read these on linux by turning them into .img files with dmg2img and then loopback mounting them.
1.1 install dmg2img
1.2 install kmod-hfsplus
1.3 run dmg2img, mount -t hfsplus -o loop,offset=20480 file.img /mnt
Ok. I have a filesystem. It has in it one file of interest. Xerox Print Driver 3.11.0.pkg This is an xar archive…. ok.
2.1 install xar
2.2 xar -xf ../Xerox\ Print\ Driver\ 3.11.0.pkg
2.3 Find a file called Payload – this is a gzipped cpio archive…. ok
3.1 gunzip -c Payload | cpio -i
3.2 cd Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources
3.3 This has some gzipped PPD files. And yes, one of them actually looks like the PPD file I might want to test!
That’s a lot of layers of packaging to get a simple text file…
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