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Graham Trott wrote: | Time for a short rant... | | Half-way through a print job (Epson C80/SuSE9.0/KDE3.1.4) I run out of paper. | So I load up with a wodge of paper and press its resume button, only to find | that I put too much in and the first sheet jammed. OK, so that's a black | mark for Epson for allowing me to load more than it could actually handle. | However, the print job is now (apparently) blocking the queue, and nothing I | do at GUI level will clear it. Of course, somewhere in the myriad of | undocumented files there's bound to be one I need to zap to clear the | problem, but if the GUI has a delete button that's what I expect it to do. <snip> Try http://localhost:631 in a browser, this should give you the normal CUPS http interface. to cancel jobs etc, you need to log into it as root. Oddly enough, you have to press admin and log in, then go back to printers to get it to give you a log in dialog. Odd, it ought to ask you to log in when you try to cancel a job without logging in... but its not a major concern.
| | There's more. In the Control Center there's a Printers section that offers | Printer Tools for the specific machine, with buttons to clean or align the | print head, print a test pattern, check the ink level and so on. Sounds
Can't really help there, i just replace the ink when it runs out. The only printer that need head cleans is the epson photo 925, and that's got a handy screen and interface to do that.
I did try 'mtink' which works on epsons, sucessfully, but haven't bothered in the last 6 months or so. <snip>
| | OK, so maybe I can access the printer remotely from Windows. Go there, choose | Settings | Printers | Add Printer. Up comes the Wizard. Choose Network | Printer. "Browse the network..." Nothing. I know Samba is up and running | 'cos I can mount my Linux box, but where's my printer? After fiddling around | for a while I find the standard Linux driver doesn't mention CUPS, but there | seems to be another that does. It won't let me change; complains about wrong | queues or somesuch, so I delete and reinstall the printer, choosing the CUPS | driver this time. Bingo, Windows can now see the printer, so I install the I found, as long as you don't want fine printer control, you can use http printing. Tell windows to print to a http printer on http://machine.with.cups.and.printer.on:631/printers/printername as a apple laserwriter (the only way to get windows to send postscript) The cups server'll sort the postscript into whatever the printer wants. Much easier than drivers for every printer on every machine!
<snip> | | Lastly, just for fun I load up an image into Gimp and select Print. Bad move. | Out comes page after page of wall-to-wall text, and stopping it seems to jam
Yes my sister did this today. Annoyingly she didn't bother to check the printer until it'd used half a ream and run out of paper. GIMP likes to have low level control of the printer. Select the print option and on the resulting dialog I imagine you'll see something like "Postscript printer level 2" or words to that effect. Click the setup option and then select the most appropriate printer. If there's only a few, you probably havent got the gimp-print package installed which provides a few hundred. For odd lasers such as the HP 1200N HP provide a "driver" - actually a simple file giving the options avaliable to cups, such as resolutions and paper trays. Anyway, select the appropriate driver for your system (regardless of which machine the printer is on) and then click the "print and save settings" button.
CUPS networking works fine for me, i have print server with two printers hanging off it. Everyone prints to one of the other, and CUPS browse will shove these two printers at any new CUPS machine that appears on the network. I did add the BrowsePoll=printserver.domain.name in /etc/cups/cupd.conf though, otherwise the printers take a few minutes to appear on the clients.
| | Somebody please tell me this is going to improve. Printing is a fairly basic Hmm. printing is gradually improving but it's one of the major problems with desktop linux at the moment.
| requirement, after all. I'd like to move my wife over to Linux, or recommend | it to other novices, but there's no way they'll put up with this kind of | crap. So here we are, trapped twixt the devil and the deep blue sea. On the | one hand, viruses, blue screens and constant demands for cash to keep the | system running; on the other, a GUI that needs a four-inch thick manual and a | degree in computer science to do the simplest of jobs. Or a tame LUG! (I hope) | | Aaaaarrghh! | | -- GT <snip>