On Wednesday 05 May 2004 12:14, Chris Glover wrote:

Two commands are your friend lpq and lprm

lpq -P<printername>

will list all the jobs in the queue and show their job number. You don't need the -P if you only have one printer installed.

lprm -P<printername> <jobno>

will remove offending job from the queue.

As for not being able to access the printer from a windows machine, it's a windows bug. W2K and XP need to have admin rights on a remote printer before they will print to it.

In the [printers] section of your smb.conf add the line

printer admin = <user1> <user2> etc then restart samba.

HTH

Chris

Thanks for the info, but the printer is still listed as access denied. I assume <user> has to be named in smbpasswd. Note: There are two sections in smb.conf: [printers] and [print$]. What do these mean?

-- G

On 2004-05-05 12:01:01 +0100 Graham Trott gt@pobox.com wrote:

However, the print job is now (apparently) blocking the queue, and nothing I do at GUI level will clear it. [...]

Is this CUPS? I keep thinking that I should try it again and it must have improved, but then I get an email like this. At the moment, I have a shell script from somewhere which talks directly to the port (no spooling), so if things go wrong, I just start the process viewer and kill the "lpr" task. Mostly, that clears the problem. No networking, but I shove remote print jobs over ssh, which is crude but easy and works.

I used to use pdq, which had a graphical configuration and control panel. That seemed to work too, but it isn't suitable for busy printers because it spools but doesn't queue. I don't remember whether it could accept network printing, but it certainly could send them. I'm sure I've a samba interface file for it somewhere here.

Of course, printing elsewhere is still often below the level of 1990. "Direct" network-attached printers have really basic control interfaces. Power-cycling the damn things seems to be the only way out sometimes. lpq may have been command-line, but at least you could control it a bit less destructively than that. Many happy hours using cmp on the lpd /var dir to remove duplicates after a paper jam before unfreezing the queue. (Why don't people act on the warning lights instead of reprinting? Actually, I think I know why... they can't remember how to free or load paper and fear the device that sounds like a sci-fi ray gun when it works may zap them.)

Last Windows printer of my own I used gave me a choice of drivers: one that only spoke Italian or one that didn't support A4. I'm still glad not to be there. "Insierra carta" (or however it's spelt) still features in my nightmares.

fiddling around for a while I find the standard Linux driver doesn't mention CUPS, but there seems to be another that does.

Ah yes, it is CUPS...

So, can someone tell me the One True Way to get secure, easy-to-control network printing if it's not CUPS? :)

On Wed, May 05, 2004 at 12:01:01PM +0100, Graham Trott wrote:

Somebody please tell me this is going to improve. Printing is a fairly basic 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.

My experience is that you get *exactly* the same sort of grief using Windows. It's just a fact of life when printing that if you confuse the printer like this it gets lost.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1

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>