Linux Printing: Still Awful After All These Years

[Tyler Aviss]

Part of the issues I find (Debian user, seems to apply to the
derivatives such as Ubuntu as well) are related to there being so many
individual printing packages, and not great dependency management. For
example, I just picked up an HP Laserjet 1018, and was setting it up
on my desktop. At first there weren't many drivers, so I installed the
usual gimp-print/gutenprint packages, etc. An appropriate driver
showed up, but it didn't do anything.

Checking the logs, it was erroring out running one of the print
modules. So I investigated further, and discovered I needed the
Foo2zjs package, which wasn't installed. *WHY* the heck would you add
a printer option to the list of printers all the necessary drivers
aren't there. Make it a damn dependency, or put it in a separate but
easily-recognizable package.

Anyhow, after that, the printer worked just fine on my desktop
machine. Now I'm trying to get it to work on my LAN-server (so I can
print from any machine on th network, and guests can too), with all
the drivers present, and it just doesn't go. According to CUPS, the
print job went through, but... nada. I'm *still* fighting with that,
but it appears to be errors relating to USBLP. I'm getting weird
errors like:

drivers/usb/class/usblp.c: usblp0: removed
usb 1-4: usbfs: USBDEVFS_CONTROL failed cmd hpiod rqt 161 rq 1 len 1 ret -110

I don't think the USB bus is broken though because my other HP print
(photosmart) and my webcam, etc all work fine there. I'm currently
looking at upgrading the kernel in case it's a bug with 2.6.22, but at
the moment I use linux-vserver which doesn't seem to have a patch for
the current 2.6.24 series.

So, long story short... printers are still often a royal *PAIN IN THE
BUTT* with linux. Sometimes they work great, and CUPS is a dream,
other times it's just a huge headache that I don't work upon anyone
else...

End of Rant. :-)





On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 9:01 AM, Neil Watson <tlug-neil-8agRmHhQ+n2CxnSzwYWP7Q at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> I find printing to be one of the weakest services on a Linux host.  When
>  I bought my printer in 1999 I specifically made sure it was a
>  postscript printer so that driver problems would not affect me.  While
>  my printer still works today I have not been exempt from a host of
>  printing problems, using multiple distributions, over the years.
>
>  After software upgrades printing would stop working.  Reinstalling
>  several packages fixed the problem but a root cause was never found.
>  The device permissions for the parallel port would change and normal
>  users were denied access.  To this day I cannot print text from the
>  command line without suffering the classic staggering effect.
>
>  --
>  Neil Watson
>  System Administrator for hire
>  http://watson-wilson.ca
>
>
> --
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-- 
Tyler Aviss
Systems Support
LPIC/LPIC-2
(647) 302-0942
--
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TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
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