Printing misery

I'm getting Jaunty Puppy alpha5 together, and I have found printing-related files that were missing in alpha4. However, testing on a couple of printers gives errors.

My Brother HL2040 uases a Foomatic PPD file, but I get the famous "foomatic-rip failed" message.

My old parallel-port Epson LX800 is not specifically listed in the Gutenprint database, however the generic "Epson 9-pin" I know from previous experience does work. Not now though, I get an error message "unsupported format 'application/postscript'".

Sigh. Debugging CUPS is extremely difficult. As Patriot commented, from his Windows 95 days, if you had a printer driver it just worked. Patriot is our resident CUPS expert, so I'll ask him if he can help with debugging alpha5.

I know that ttuuxx had success with Dpup, by installing some other CUPS and Gutenprint PET packages, and probably the same treatment will work with Upup. But, I would really like to get the native .deb packages to work.

Note, I'll probably upload alpha5 in about 24 hours from now.

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Comments

Foomatic Patches
Username: rcrsn
If your version of foomatic-rip still uses Perl scripts, you will need to apply the -U patch to both /usr/bin/foomatic-rip and /usr/bin/foomatic-gswrapper. This patch is discussed in Patriot's CUPS 1.3.9 thread. However, if you have upgraded foomatic to the compiled versions, then the problem will be elsewhere. There is a thread in Hardware>Printers on how to install CUPS 1.3.9 in Upup. Setting the CUPS daemon loglevel to "debug" and wading through the error logs will usually identify the actual problem that caused foomatic-rip to fail.

Tags: woof