efax - how do you use it?

[hvengel]

Since I am in the process of rebuilding my system after the system disk failed (lost both Windows and Linux) I decided that I would try to get fax software running on the Linux side rather than using the Windows fax software. I followed the FAX HOWTO at http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_FAX_Server and I got everything installed and all of the setup instructions seem to work other than the one thing right below this. But I can't get it to do anything useful and there are some issues with the information on the wiki.

First the wiki says to do this:

chmod 666 /dev/ttyS1
ln -s /dev/ttyS1 /dev/modem

My modem is on /dev/ttyS0 so I made that change. But every time I restart the system I have to redo these before efax will see my modem. How do I make these setting hold across system restarts?

Once the above is in place I can run "fax" and I get:

$ efax
efax: Mon Oct 2 15:26:11 2006 efax v 0.9a-001114 Copyright 1999 Ed Casas
efax: Mon Oct 2 15:26:11 2006 efax v 0.9a-001114 Copyright 1999 Ed Casas
efax: 26:11 compiled Oct 2 2006 10:47:44
efax: 26:11 opened /dev/modem
efax: 26:12 using USRobotics Courier V.Everything USRobotics Courier V.Everything Product type US/Canada External Supervisor date 03/13/98 in class 2.0
efax: 28:13 Error: unable to answer call
efax: 28:14 done, returning 3 (invalid modem response)

Which might be OK since there was no call that needed to be answered and it does find the modem. The problem is how do I use this thing to do anything useful? I have setup cups per the instructions on the wiki and I do have a fax printer show up in my print dialogs but when I print to the fax printer nothing happens other than the job appearing in the CUPS print queue. It never asks for a fax number or anything. The wiki is missing all of the useage related information and the author of the wiki is asking for someone to edit the wiki to add this information. When I search the web looking for information on using efax I find almost nothing and what I have found is worse that the wiki HOWTO.

Do I need to install other applications? Is there a good front end for this? The only front end I found in portage is efax-gtk and it is masked for amd64. I installed it anyway and it seems to run. But it only accepts postscript files for sending and having to convert every file I want to send by hand is PITA and contrary to what the help system for efax-gtk says postscript is not "a format produced by all Unix/Linux word and document processors". I know OppenOffice, at least the way it is installed on Gentoo does not. How do I get the fax printer in CUPS to work? Does anyone know of a better HOWTO for this? This simply should not be this strange to setup.

[badchien]

I've never used efax, but I'll just mention that I've had very good results with hylafax, where we usually use it in client/server configurations, and it has client apps for windows and linux. If you get stuck with efax you might give it a try.

[Bill Thompson]

efax seems to have some problem with permissions. I had to use the following:

chmod u+s /usr/bin/efax

in order to use efax as a user.

This may help.

[jhardin]

[Bill Thompson]

1. openoffice does save in postscript. You must open the print box and then save to a file. The file is saved as postscript.

Thre is an older program -- xfax -- which I have installed which uses the covert program (part of imagmagick) to make g3 files. I have had limited success with it, and my guess is that it is not mainstained actively. Independently, imagemagick's 'convert' can be used for batch files, so using that command first to create tiffg3 (or postscript) files would probably be the best solution, even though it's a two stage process, but very quick.

You may still need to use the comments in my first post concerning permissions.