[ale] Epson CX8400 on Ubuntu

[JK]

Hi folks,

I have an Epson Stylus CX8400 multifunction inkjet that I got for my
daughter. It works fine on her Mac Mini under OSX, and under XP on
my laptop.  Out of curiosity, I plugged it into my Ubuntu 9.10 box;
it was immediately recognized, and a test page printed successfully.

However, when I try to print a real document from OpenOffice, or a
page in Firefox, the results are less good.  OO docs always come out
as a series of completely blank pages, and FF prints very very
faintly, with random artifacts here and there.

Any idea what might be up with that? This printer has a bewildering
array of options in the printer-config applet. I've tried tweaking
some of them (specifically color model and print quality) with no
joy. So any suggestions would be appreciated. If I can get this to
work I can avoid springing for a new laser printer for another
little while.

Thanks,

-- JK