I have a Silhouette portrait plugged in to a USB port on Ubuntu 13.10. By looking at the ports using "lsusb" I see that it is at port

/dev/bus/usb/001/005

(it doesn't look like the usual /dev/ttyUSB0 or whatever, because I happen to be running Ubuntu on a chromebox.. anyway long story, that may be part of the problem but I don't think so.)

I installed inkcut according to instructions, draw a path, select it, and run Inkcut. The dialog pops up but "Device" along the top is empty and greyed out. So I presume you have to press "Properties" button to set it up.

I press "Properties" and try all sorts of combinations of pasting "/dev/bus/usb/001/005" into either Printer Name, or Serial Port fields, and all sorts of combinations of settings, but clicking Save does nothing (the original "Device" bar is still empty and greyed out). Furthermore the "Test connection" button seems to do nothing.

So on to Plan B.

I read online that Graphtec Silhouette printers have a different protocol. Things like replace PU with M and some other substitutions. So I put a file with the following text onto my desktop and called it testcut:

;;M0,0;D2000,0;D2000,2000;D0,2000;D0,0;M;H

(there could be an error there -- that's my best effort at a simple cut commands)

Then, I attempt to send that to the printer using this command:

sudo cat Desktop/testcut > /dev/bus/usb/001/005

or

sudo echo Desktop/testcut > /dev/bus/usb/001/005

In the first case I get "cat: write error: Invalid argument" and in the second case I get "bash: echo: write error: invalid argument".

Humph. I don't have a Plan C. Any ideas for how to get this working?

Update: I tried a bunch of other stuff and eventually gave up.

I started again from scratch, this time on Windows. I have a printer driver on the installation CD and I install it and it works fine (meaning, I can draw a path in Inkscape and click File > Print, then it does indeed cut).

However I'd still like to get Inkcut working because it has some nice options and I want to extend it in the future with additional functionality (which I can't do with my current option (raw printer driver)).

So anyway on Windows I installed everything exactly as described here:
viewtopic.php?f=31&t=4987&start=100#p49964
and Inkcut extension starts, but again the "Device" box is empty and greyed out. So I click Properties. Now that I have a working Printer I choose "Printer" and try various things in the "printer" box but it's not working.. What exactly should go in this box??

It may not be working because one of the steps at that previous link was to comment out some of the printer-specific (cups-specific) lines in main.py. However I don't know what to replace it with in my case, if anything.. Rather at a loss here..

Thanks,
David

Hi!
I'm just bumping this thread up because I'm thinking on buying a Silhouette to use it under Ubuntu, and I would appreciate any hint on how to make it work...

Unfortunately I never got it working either on windows or linux, and moved on with my life. But I didn't know what I was doing.

Maybe someone else has had success?

procastino, let me know if you solve it!

David, I managed to make it work on Ubuntu 15.04 and I'm enjoying my Portrait with inkscape and Inkcut. I wrote down the steps: https://bricolabs.cc/wiki/en/guias/graphtec_inkcut_configuration Hope it helps!

Have the Portrait working perfectly with inkcut, time to stencil all the glasses!
Unfortunately Procrastino's link is gone, but the way back machine has it (https://web.archive.org/web/20160331121 ... figuration )
The linked file at sourceforge works great (https://sourceforge.net/p/inkcut/featur ... 6dc9/#dc1d ) though as noted further in the SF thread and Procastino's post, watch out for un-unioned paths.
I installed the plotter via CUPS before trying the inkcut plugin, using "raw" as the manufacturer, so it turned up handy in the inkcut options.
(I'm running Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa)

Hi triploidtree,

They migrated the web and now the right link is in : https://bricolabs.cc/wiki/en/guias/grap ... figuration

Very happy it helped someone get their cutter working!