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.
 
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.
 
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...
 
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).

Links

January

SunMonTueWedThuFriSat
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24
 
25
 
26
 
27
 
28
 
29
 
30
 
31