Printer hassle
My Epson Stylus Photo 870 printer started misbehaving ... but only when
connected to my debian (Sarge) PC. Plugged into a Win98SE PC it worked
fine.
The principal symptom was that it would print in monochrome red when it
was supposed to be printing black. Color images would not print at all.
I attempted fixing it by deleting the printer and reinstalling it; I
chose a different driver: Epson Stylus Photo 870 Foomatic/Stp870p.upp.
It still won't print correctly; only partial colors even though the
printer test pages available through the OpenOffice.org printer
management GUI or the CUPS GUI both look OK. Photos won't print
completely - just a few spots here and there.
When I invoke lpoptions -l in terminal it says there's no PPD file
for this printer.
In Mozilla Firefox it tries to print but nothing happens after it
starts the spooling process and CUPS says there are no jobs in the
queue. In OpenOffice 1.1 it prints black OK but images are incomplete
in that only a few spots of color appear. When I invoke mtink in
terminal it says that the colored inks are getting used up willy
nilly even though next to no color has actually ended up on the paper.
It looks to me as though the printer installation (which I did through
the CUPS GUI interface) wasn't completed. What do I do next ?
For a while I thought I'd just give up on this printer and connect it
instead to a Windows PC ... but then I found out that Epson printers
are just about the best ones to use with Linux. So I'd have an even
worse hassle with a new printer.
George Langford
george@georgesbasement.com
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