lp0 on fire - Epson Stylus Color 480 with Woody and Knoppix and CUPS
Hello folks.
My logs are showing lp0 to be on fire. This is an Epson Stylus Color
480. It behaved oddly last time I printed something - a few weeks back.
It was a fairly large print job, which it refused to touch only to
print the lot out the next time I booted. Thereafter it refused to
print anything.
I'm using Woody. After googling lots and playing some, and getting
nowhere, I decided to do a knoppix hd install on a spare hard drive, to
see if I could rule a printer hardware problem out. Sadly the hardware
problem possibility now seems to be ruled in, as the logs in the
knoppix install agree that lp0 is on fire. I left the printer
disconnected for a while to see if the problem would clear, but it
didn't. I'll perhaps leave the cable out overnight, just on the
off-chance.
When I fiddle with the CUPS admin routine through my browser I can
sometimes get the printer to clear its throat and shuffle its shoulders
(which it also still does when I switch it on) but then it falls
silent. It won't print anything. The jobs are queued, and the parallel
port claims to be busy (trying again in thirty seconds). When I cancel
the jobs and switch the printer off and on through admin the printer is
shown to be idle - but it still won't print.
tunelp /dev/lp0 gives the IRQ as -1, which seemed odd to me, but as
polling is being used perhaps this is right? The cable looks okay. Both
ends are attached to something, one of which is the printer. I wondered
initially whether it was perhaps simply out of ink, but Escputil won't
run - when I try to do anything at all, declaring the raw device,
Escputil hangs. Somewhere I came across ps aux | grep root and then
kill -9 anything odd and printer-related: there was stuff to kill, but
it never solved the problem.
So: Does the fact that the problem occurs with two different installs
mean that it is definitely hardware related, or is there another
possibility? I wish I had another machine or another printer or even
another printer cable so that I could narrow things down a bit. I'll
probably end up buying a cable then a printer and then discover the
motherboard is beginning to fail or something. I'm using the latest
2.4.18-1-k6 kernel image on the Woody, although I doubt it matters. Any
advice please?
lpinfo -v -l gives the following:
network socket
network http
network ipp
network lpd
direct epson:/dev/lp0
direct parallel:/dev/lp0
serial serial:/dev/ttyS0?baud=115200
serial serial:/dev/ttyS1?baud=115200
serial serial:/dev/ttyS2?baud=115200
serial serial:/dev/ttyS3?baud=115200
direct usb:/dev/usb/lp0
direct usb:/dev/usb/lp1
direct usb:/dev/usb/lp2
direct usb:/dev/usb/lp3
direct usb:/dev/usb/lp4
direct usb:/dev/usb/lp5
direct usb:/dev/usb/lp6
direct usb:/dev/usb/lp7
direct usb:/dev/usb/lp8
direct usb:/dev/usb/lp9
direct usb:/dev/usb/lp10
direct usb:/dev/usb/lp11
direct usb:/dev/usb/lp12
direct usb:/dev/usb/lp13
direct usb:/dev/usb/lp14
direct usb:/dev/usb/lp15
Geoff
Reply to: