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ID Card Printing Under Linux?
peng1can asks: "I'm searching for a way to print ID cards in a an LDAP and preferably open source environment. We use LDAP heavily, and ideally we want to be able to pull user information and photos from LDAP and print onto ID Cards. Thus far, I've come up against two roadblocks: 1) Trying to make the ID station work under linux would be great, especially if I can script gphoto. But, I can't find an ID-card printer that doesn't supply windows-only drivers. The closest thing I can find is that Eltron provides a programming manual for their printers, but I have no knowledge of how to write a CUPS/LPRng printer driver. 2) If we had to resort to a Win-based workstation, I can find no method for accessing LDAP in a way that would work with an ID card system without spending thousands of dollars per station on an LDAP/ODBC gateway. I could try to write something in PERL for Win32, but can't find a way to control a digital camera that way. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated."
Buy some kind of cheap color printer that works under Linux (most mainstream printers will probably work).
Buy a pair of scissors.
Buy a lamination machine with some ID sized laminating sleeves.
Print. Cut. Laminate.
I don't know how often you'll be making IDs, but if you're willing to buy one of those id making machines, it's probably still cheaper to pay some student a cheap wage to handle the paper cutting and laminating than it would be to have the machine do it for you.
In one of my jobs, I worked with a Fargo ID card printer... and I found that even on Windows the drivers were shaky. As far as I know, no ID card printer provides drivers for any platforms other than Mac and Win, so it's pretty much between one of those two that you've got to choose.
I'm curious: what's your reason for wanting to control the digital camera with a computer? Personally I would just mount it on a tripod and take the shot manually.
The only reason I can think of (that you might computer-control) is for focusing, that is, through an image on a monitor rather than squinting at the digicam's 1.8" LCD. But digicams don't have that ability anyway (not that I know of, unless you switch into video mode). For that, what my school did at its ID card printing center was to get some DV video cameras (with stills capability) and fed live the video live into computers. Seems overkill to me, frankly.
Also, I'm not sure what your requirements are exactly, but LDAP access is QED (quite easily done) with the right modules.