Hi again ....
I did a large number of changes including the installation of a custom kernel.
I can now print directly to the paralel port (HP LJ4) using
echo -en "\rHello\r\f" > /dev/lp0
This tells me that the basic prerequisites for printing are there.
I can now see the usb printer when I do a Kmenu - system -info center - usb
devices. If I try to print using
echo -en "\rHello\r\f" > /dev/usb/lp0
the printout vanishes into thin air.
If I open a Konq window and go to http://localhost:631/, for some bizarre
reason it now tries to open the page with kWrite. If I go to
http://localhost:631/jobs however, it renders the page properly - very weird,
it never did that before. Anyway, using cups, the two printers behave the
same ... if I sent a test print from the cups web interface, cups reports a
sent page but there is no output, no active job and the job that was just
sent shows as having been cancelled in the completed jobs window.
Leaving the usb problem alone for now, I would expect the printjob on the HP
printer to go through ok since I can print to it with the command line.
Looking at the cups error_log file I see the following error messages
Job 1 queued on 'hp' by 'root'.
Unable to convert file 0 to printable format for job 1!
Hint: Do you have ESP Ghostscript installed?
Hint: Try setting the LogLevel to "debug".
Started "/usr/lib/cups/cgi-bin/jobs.cgi" (pid=1311)
Started "/usr/lib/cups/cgi-bin/jobs.cgi" (pid=1312)
Started "/usr/lib/cups/cgi-bin/jobs.cgi" (pid=1313)
.....
I have the gs-esp package loaded and gs seems to be loaded as well (??).
I am now officially completely lost .....
Oh, if I do a cat <filename> > /dev/lp0, that job ends up getting printed.
With the debug flag set, the errors are basicaly similar to the above but an
additional error shows up ......
AcceptClient() 5 from playtime:631.
ReadClient() 5 GET /printers/hp HTTP/1.1
SendError() 5 code=403
CloseClient() 3
AcceptClient() 3 from playtime:631.
GET /printers/hp?op=print-test-page HTTP/1.1
SendError() 3 code=403
AcceptClient() 6 from localhost:631.
....
What the heck am I missing ?????
Any thoughts anybody ???
Just to recapp, I removed (purged) all cups related packages, built the custom
kernel (several times til I got everything sorted), installed it and reloaded
all cups related packages (cupsys, cupsys-client, cupsys-bsd,
cupsys-driver-gimpprint, cupsomatic-ppd)