OK, following or trying to follow, Wayne's advice, I am attempting to use
lp -d star temprint.txt.
to print to a raw printer. It does not work. My user account is in the lp group, the printer is set up as raw in cups, and it is named star.
When I do
lpstat -P star
all the jobs have piled up there one after the other, and can be cleared by lprm. There are no failure messages however.
I have tried
lp -P star -o raw
But it seems to not recognize the raw option and to only expect page numbers.
On the other hand,
cat temprint > /dev/usb/lp0
works just fine.
If you use cat as above, there is a real risk as Wayne pointed out. If the printer is offline, then its true, the application freezes. This is not desirable at all. Though, its a pretty robust printer, so maybe this is a chance I have to take. And maybe I could provide some kind of choice to just turn off the printing command and clear the queue and tell the user to call for assistance. But it is not good at all. Its a disaster waiting to happen.
So it would be nice to be able to use lp. But how? And does anyone have any suggestion why it might not be working or what to check?
I also cannot figure out, despite much googling, how to test for whether the raw printer is on line and functioning. Nothing I have tried gives any different result if it is powered on or off.
Peter
Peter Alcibiades wrote:
So it would be nice to be able to use lp. But how? And does anyone have any suggestion why it might not be working or what to check?
I also cannot figure out, despite much googling, how to test for whether the raw printer is on line and functioning. Nothing I have tried gives any different result if it is powered on or off.
What does the printer status say in the cups admin pages ? i.e https://localhost:631
Don't bother with the test print option from there, it will print rubbish on your printer and probably lots of it.
But it should be fairly obvious there why the printer is accepting jobs but not printing them,
Peter
main@lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!
On Sunday 14 March 2010 11:09:19 Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Peter Alcibiades wrote:
So it would be nice to be able to use lp. But how? And does anyone have any suggestion why it might not be working or what to check?
I also cannot figure out, despite much googling, how to test for whether the raw printer is on line and functioning. Nothing I have tried gives any different result if it is powered on or off.
What does the printer status say in the cups admin pages ? i.e https://localhost:631
Don't bother with the test print option from there, it will print rubbish on your printer and probably lots of it.
But it should be fairly obvious there why the printer is accepting jobs but not printing them,
Peter
main@lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!
Wayne, thanks for replying.
This is the puzzling thing: it just hangs. From the terminal:
lp -d star printemp.txt request id is star-1091 (1 file(s))
lpq -P star shows
lpq -P star star is ready and printing Rank Owner Job File(s) Total Size active peter 1091 printemp.txt 1024 bytes
in Cups it shows processing since 15.30 - that is an hour or so now.
star-1091 printemp.txt peter 1k Unknown processing since Sun Mar 14 15:30:14 2010
But nothing comes out of the printer.
I must be missing something simple. But what?
Peter
On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 04:50:56PM +0000, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
But nothing comes out of the printer.
I must be missing something simple. But what?
Increase the verbosity of the logfiles and examine them carefully and if you can't resolve it put them on pastebin.ca and link them here or if they are just a few lines or snippets then put them in your next email to the list.
If you do sort it out by yourself please post back so we know what it was!
Adam
It may be that the problem is caused by USB. So I will take in a parallel cable and set it up as /dev/lp0, and see if that works.
The other thing to do might be rather than passing a command to the shell, to launch a shell script from the programme. That would maybe allow the programme to continue to step through without being locked by failure of the print command, and I could maybe find some way to drop out of the shell if the printer is offline?
Next time, moral is, buy a printer with linux drivers. It will be cheap at the price, whatever it is.
Peter
-
Adam Bower -
Peter Alcibiades -
Wayne Stallwood