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eftychia: Me in poufy shirt, kilt, and Darth Vader mask, playing a bouzouki (vader)
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Why Can't They Just Get Along?

posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 01:58am on 2007-05-25 under , ,

Okay, the cable is connected ... 'lsusb' shows that the computer can see the printer ... I click "Print Test Page" in 'Gnome-CUPS-Manager' for that printer ... I get a message saying the test page has been sent to the printer ... the status window for that printer in thr CUPS-manager shows my print job with a status of "Printing" ... and then it changes to "job stopped" and the "resume" option in the pop-up window is greyed out. Logged in as myself, this happens. Logged in a root, this still happens.

What ought-to-be-obvious (but isn't obvious from the 'man' page) detail am I most likely overlooking here? The printer is on-line as far as I can tell (it's powered up but doesn't have a separate "on-line" or "ready" LED; the LCD says "plain paper / normal / 100%" as expected, and the "error" LED is dark). At first I thought I had a bad cable, but 'lsusb' does report a device of the right brand plugged in.

The last time I managed a printer from *nix was back in the 'lpd' days, using RS232 ports and parallel ports, not CUPS nor USB.

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There are 4 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
 

Link

posted by [identity profile] unix-vicky.livejournal.com at 07:17am on 2007-05-25
Are you using Ubuntu? This link seems to indicate there may be a bug. But it gives lots of diagnostic tools anyway.
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Re: Link

posted by [identity profile] dglenn.livejournal.com at 07:02pm on 2007-05-25
Debian (but Ubuntu is related, right?).

Hmm. On that page, they show 'lpinfo -v' reporting a USB printer as being named /dev/usblp0 -- on my machine it's reporting the printer as /dev/lp0 ... I wonder whether that's a meaningful symptom, or just a version/ditro difference.
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Re: Link

posted by [identity profile] dglenn.livejournal.com at 08:14pm on 2007-05-25
Okay, I went around in circles for a while using the HTTP interface for CUPS, but finally noticed that a) it kept wanting to assign the printer to /dev/lp0 no matter what I did, and described it as 'parallel', even though it was autodetecting the damned thing on the USB port, and b) there was an evil-twin printer that I could not remove.

So I ssh'd to a different machine to look up major/minor device numbers and 'mknod'ed /dev/usblp0 by hand, switched to a root desktop to delete all printers from Gnome, and went through the "add new printer" screens in a web browser again.

This time, asking it to print a test page generated brief, tiny noises and made the power light on the printer flash for a very long time.

Oh wait, a piece of paper finally came out! :-)

Mostly blank, with what looks like a grey pixellated ghost image of something indistinct on the top half-inch. :-(

At least the CUPS daemon is talking to the right port though, so it's progress...
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Re: Link

posted by [identity profile] unix-vicky.livejournal.com at 08:39pm on 2007-05-25
Well, that was clearly more difficult than it should have been. But now it sounds like you have the port stuff working, you may just need to pick a different printer driver (my Fedora has driver "collections" from Gimp, and HP, and a few other projects, so you can pick the one that works best).
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