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[LUG] Printing again ..

 


So.. We were going OK with wifey ignoring her HP printer/scanner device and using the laserprinter - until the laser ran out of cyan - and it refuses to even print monochrome documents, so a new cart ordered (for a mere £110 )-:

Meanwhile she needed to print - so I did more looking. Decided to uninstall the hplip installed by Debian and get the one of HP directly - which involces compiling (my wife actually followed the steps, but because stuck when it asked her to install gcc...)

Anyway, that was a no-goer either. I tried various combinations, incantations, etc. I even unplugged the USB and plugged in the Ethernet port. IT still didn't work, but I was quite amazed to find that the printer has a full-blown print engine actually inside it an has a web itnerface to control it all too. Even controls to scan to a network drive (I think). Anyway, that just gave us different error messages (which were printed out, but my wife appears to have shreded them, so I can't recall what they were, but I did google them and didn't realyl get any further.

So... I decided to install CUPS on my own PC and un-install lpr and see if that made any difference... XFCE4 doesn't have any printing widgets, so I needed to use cups directly (http://localhost:631) it found the printer on the network, added it in, and printed a test page to it - the first time the printer has printed anything properly since it was removed from the old XP machine!

I eventually got xpdf to print to CUPS and lo and behold it worked just fine.

I've not had time to go back to her PC and strip out and re-install CUPS, but I guess that's on the cards - the use the CUPS webby interface to set it up rather than the Gnome widgets and see if that makes any difference.

Gordon
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