Wayne Stallwood wrote:

Not a CUPS expert by any means, but this sounds like a flaky/incorrect printer driver to me.

What printer and CUPS driver are you using ?

Hi, The posts on this arrived after I left work yesterday, but I had another go last night and got it working. I think what *may* have happened is that because I'd been initially faffing about with various drivers/ports/settings the parallel port had got into an unhappy state. So when I then thought it should work as I'd got the settings correct (Epson Stylus C70, driver something like cups-2.4-gimp-something, /dev/lp0) it still kept spitting out nonsense. In the end a reboot cured it and it printed me a glorious test page. I then spent a while trying to print to it from a second linux box; I could see the request was getting through to the server by watching the output to the logfiles, but it seemed unhappy with "get_printer_attr" - "no good!" type errors. It'll be something silly somewhere. Thanks, Jenny