I had the same kind of problem with some drivers (plxmono, I guess) ... Look at foomatic-* & *ijs packages, some drivers may work better .. Be warned, through, that upgrading gs-epl to ghostscript (v8.61.dfsg.1~svn8187), at least for me, caused CUPS to log that everything printed fine, while printer's dead silent !!! PS : something is printed, so CUPS's not at fault