Re: printing problem - spurious "d" characters, bad pixels,spurious form feeds - SOLVED

["Daniel B." <dsb@smart.net>]

IB. wrote:
> charles norwood wrote:
> > On Thu, 2006-07-06 at 10:27 -0400, Daniel B. wrote:
> ...
> > > Also, given that the spurious characters appear at different places in
> > > the printout when I try again suggests that something random is going
> > > on (dropped or extra characters in the output stream), which doesn't
> > > sound like having the wrong PPD file.
> > >
> > > Oh--another thing is that since upgrading to Sarge and 2.6.8
> > > (2.6.8-2-k7-smp), trying to print occasionally hangs the entire system.
> > >
> > > That suggests a problem with the parallel port driver or something
> > > closer to that later.
> > >
> > > Daniel
> > I don't have an answer, but my experience is "random" errors are due to
> > hardware failing.  
>
> No, I'm pretty sure it's not failing hardware:  The hardware worked fine
> with Woody, kernel 2.4, and the pre-CUPs printing system.  And it still
> works fine when I boot into Windows and print.

I found the technical problem.  As I hypothesized, it was a problem with
the kernel in the parallel port driver.  CONFIG_PARPORT_PC_FIFO was
enabled.

The fact that CONFIG_PARPORT_PC_FIFO is experimental leads to another
question:  Why the hell did a Debian kernel for the _stable_ release (Sarge)
use an _experimental_ kernel option?!

Daniel