[cups.general] Cups

Bernd Schubert bernd-schubert at web.de
Sat May 8 17:14:47 PDT 2004


Michael Sweet wrote:

> John wrote:
>> Hi
>> I would like to be provocative.
> 
> By all means, please do! :)
> 

May I kindly ask for better debugging support in cups? I already wrote once
to cups.development how I think cups log messages should look like,
unfortunality I never got a response. 
Maybe I was writing too unfriedly that time, but I had just spent several
ours to get a printer working that should be working out of the box
regarding to linuxprinting.org. The log messages cups is producing
didn't/doesn't help me a slightest bit in that case.

[snip]

> 
> Fortunately, Linux support for most business printers and many
> consumer printers is quite good as long as you are using a
> printer-friendly Linux distro that keeps up with the free software
> printer drivers.
> 

Well, I don't know if you consider debian to be a printer-friendly distro,
but it currently has certain problems with epson inkjet printers. 
My bugreport is here:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=235522

The debian maintainer still didn't answer. I also posted the problem to this
list but got no answer. Later another report regarding debian+cups+epson
was posted to this list, but Vittorio also got no helpful answer.

It might be a usual behaviour for windows users that only 1/3 of all
available drivers is working and that log messages doesn't even give an
idea about the problem, but for unix this is really bad.

Another funny story is that the cups http configuration frontend doesn't
list all drivers. For the epson stylus C82 only the non-working
(Cups+gimprint) driver is listed, but not the working driver
(foomatic+gimprint-ijs). Without the kde-printing manager I even wouldn't
have known about the other driver, since even its ppd is not listed at
linuxprinting.org.

Taking additionally our[*] general[**] and also our
latex209+postscript+ghostscript[***] related printing problems into account
I have to admit, that printing from windows usually[****] works better.

Hoping for getting a response this time,
Bernd


PS:

[*] Theoretical Chemistry group of the University of Heidelberg
[**] After updating our system from Suse-7.0 with gs-5.50 to first Suse-7.3
and later to Debian stable/testing, we experienced lots of printing
problems. Most of them could be solved by setting AFPL-gs >=8.10 as
default, however there still the [***] problems
[***] Since we upgraded latex produce improper postscript code with old
latex209 documents. Viewing them works with ghostscript, but printing
doens't work properly.
[****] Windows has the usual problem, that after is has been working some
time, it doesn't like to work any longer. The win98 from our secretary
crashed from one day to another for 2/3 of all print jobs. 
Now she has to use our usual linux system *g*




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