wierd printing problem
hi,
I have a usb printer (Brother HL-1440) at home which I share between
my laptop (HP Omnibook 4100) and my desktop (Apple Bue-and-White G3).
Since I usually only have one computer on at a time, the printer isn't
networked; instead I simply unplug it from one computer and throw it
into the other when I need it.
On the laptop (running debian sarge/sid) the printer works perfectly.
When I boot into MacOS 9.2 on the desktop, the printer once again
works perfectly. But using debian Sid(PowerPC) on the desktop, I get
strange and unpredictable errors. 3 or 4 pages may print perfectly,
followed by half a page, a line or two of non-alphanumeric characters
(mostly smiley faces and playing-card suits like hearts, clubs,
spades...), then a page break, the next section of the page, more
garbage, and then maybe the rest of the page. In some cases I can
pretty reliably count on particular pages to print poorly; in others
the errors are non-reproducible.
I've checked all the USB connections and they seem to work pretty
well; and as I said, the printer works perfectly when I boot into
MacOS. Using OpenOffice, I compared the .ps files prduced when
printing one particularly troublesome file. The file produced on my
laptop (which works perfectly) was identical to the one produced on my
desktop. Then I compared the /var/log/cups/error_log's on the two
machines -- the output was nearly identical, with slight version
differences in foomatic-rip and a couple of minor configuration
differences in the ppd's; I apt-got and edited the ppd's on the
desktop, but still to no avail.
Where should I look next? I don't know how else to diagnose this issue.
thanks as always,
matt
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