Re: Printer Problems

[Donald Spoon <dspoon@astcomm.net>]

Thomas H. George,,, wrote:
> I have three standalone systems all with cupsys, cupsomatic, cupsys-bsd, 
> cupsys-driver-gimpprint, gimp1.2, gimp1.2-print and kdelibs3-cups:
>
>    Debian Woody, 2.4.18 kernel with HP Deskjet 940c, Foomatic+hpijs     
> (my daughter)
>
>    Debian Woody,  2.4.18 kernel with Brother HL-730, Foomatic+hl7x0   
> (my grandsons)
>
>    Debian Testing, 2.4.20 kernel with  Epson Stylus Color 860, 
> CUPS+GIMP-print v4.2.2-pre2  (mine)
>
> The problem: Printing a simple ASCII file (printtest) from a terminal. 
> The results of lp printtest are as follows:
>
>        Brother HL-730:                                OK.  Prints the 
> file with no problems.
>
>        HP Deskjet 940c:                                 Ejects a blank 
> page.
>
>        Epson Stylus Color 860:    Nothing.  There is an error in 
> /var/log/cups/error_log
>                                                                    (See 
> previous posting, Gimp Print Problem
>                                                                      
> (for details.)
>
> All of these printers print the test pattern from a terminal:
>
>            lp /usr/share/cups/data/testprint.ps
>
> All of these printers print perfectly from kde.
>
> History:  I am weening my daughter and grandsons from Windows 98 with 
> its perpetual problems.  I chose kde to give them something similar to 
> Windows and this is when my troubles began.  I found I had to install 
> cupsomatic and kdelibs3-cups get their printers to work.  This is fine 
> since they never switch from X windows to a terminal but I do.  After 
> dpkg --purge lprng, lpr, and magicfilter and installing cupsys-bsd I am 
> able to use the Brother HL-730 but not the other two printers.
>
> I would appreciate any assistance with this problem

Sounds like you are missing a "filter".  Here are a couple of 
suggestions for each situation:

1.  Check and make sure you have Ghostscript installed and working.

2.  In the KDE Control Center --> System --> Printing Manager --> [your 
printer, i.e "LP", etc] --> Instances --> Settings you will get a pop-up 
window with 3 tabs.  The last tab is called "filters".  Select this and 
 experiment with adding the available filters.  I have a "generic image 
to postscript" filter and a "pdf writer (needs Ghostscript)" filter 
available here.  You might have to experiment with the order, and you 
might not need all of them... dunno.

HTH,

-Don Spoon-