[ale] Printing problems

Scott Castaline hscast at charter.net
Sat Jun 23 16:08:10 EDT 2007


Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-06-23 at 13:38 -0400, Scott Castaline wrote:
>> Sometime way back I had tried to upgrade hplip to version 1.7.4a and was
>> unsuccessful so decided to revert back to the original version I had on
>> my FC6 system. Since then I have had strange problems with printing that
>> is inconsistent, depending upon what I'm printing and through which
>> application. I want to try to rebuild by first removing than
>> reinstalling the printer system. What all do I need to be concerned with
>> aside from cups and hplip?
> 
> Probably the package manager.
> 
> I don't quite know how RPM does things, because I try very hard to stay 
> away from it (much for the same reasons that ESR finally gave up on it, 
> though I gave up on it /way/ before he did).  However, I do know that 
> the Debian package system will let you reinstall software while 
> retaining the configuration (e.g., sudo apt-get remove cupsys, which is 
> used to uninstall the CUPS printing system, will retain the CUPS 
> configuration files; sudo apt-get --purge remove cupsys is required to 
> also remove the configuration files).  This is useful if you want to, 
> for example, replace the binary package with a locally-compiled package 
> that wants to take advantage of the same configuration files.
> 
> If RPM has such a system that retains the configuration files after 
> uninstalling a package, then you should watch out for that and ensure 
> that RPM removes any configuration files that are installed by the 
> printing subsystems.
> 
> You may also, for completeness, wish to remove the rest of the printing 
> system.  I don't know how inter-connected hplip is with the rest of the 
> printing utilities, but I do know that CUPS uses (in many distributions) 
> its own version of Ghostscript (ESP Ghostscript), which is often 
> installed alongside GNU or GPL Ghostscript.  There is also GIMP-Print, 
> which CUPS can use as an output driver, but I don't think that there is 
> any relationship between it and hplip, since they both perform the same 
> function---just different ways.  You may want to simply check what all 
> of the dependencies are of both CUPS and hplip and remove them all, 
> along with configuration files, and then reinstall them all from scratch.
> 
> An aside:  I have had /extremely/ good results printing from Ubuntu to 
> various printers, including those supported by the hplip drivers.  I 
> have found that CUPS is a pretty finicky system, though, and works 
> perfectly fine for me on Ubuntu and some other distributions that I have 
> tried---but is pretty much useless (at least for my purposes) on FreeBSD 
> with my USB-connected laser printer.  Given how finicky CUPS is, though, 
> it is entirely possible that the problem might lie somewhere therein, 
> even if that's not where the problem /should/ be.
> 
>     --- Mike
> 
> --
> Michael B. Trausch 	
> michael.trausch at gmail.com
> Phone: (404) 592-5746 	
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> 
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The most notable problem is when I print from Adobe Acroread. Each 
subsequent page printed keeps on shrinking until you can't read it 
anymore. The other free pdf viewers cuts off parts of the pages. When I 
print from the web browser using duplex printing it'll print on one 
side, and just eject the paper on the other side and do the printing on 
the next page. Other times it'll print, eject and load a 2nd page and 
eject again. So far printing from OpenOffice apps seem to be okay. I 
would knock on wood after saying that, but I have a headache. This all 
started when I had done the previously mentioned changes.



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