Increasingly frequent error "foomatic-rip failed"

Richard Rasker rasker at linetec.nl
Wed Sep 23 03:27:27 PDT 2009


Hello all,
I'm running a CUPS print server under Debian Etch, connected to an old Epson EPL-5700 parallel port laser printer. CUPS gives the following information:

Description: Epson EPL-5700
Location: Printserver
Make and Model: Epson EPL-5700 Foomatic/hpijs-pcl5e (recommended)
Printer State: idle, accepting jobs, published.
Device URI: epson:/dev/lp0

This setup has always worked just fine, until recently (several weeks ago).
Ever more often, print jobs stop with the following error message:
"/usr/lib/cups/filter/foomatic-rip failed"

Googling for this error message turned up literally dozens of possible vague causes, with often equally vague solutions (e.g. running aa-complain cupsd as root). So far, nothing worked
The error appears to be related to graphics rendering, as it consistently happens when attempting to print a Google Maps page, and with some (but not all) PDF files,

Also, I downloaded & installed the appropriate PPD file again from
  http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=Epson-EPL-5700
but to no avail.

So I set LogLevel to debug, and captured the following output from the Google Maps print job:
  http://www.linetec.nl/linux/cups-error1.txt

("Ongeldige zoekopdracht" means something like "Invalid Search Command")
It seems that something is going wrong with the renderer:
  Process dying with "The renderer command line returned an unrecognized error code 255.", exit stat: 1

In the end, foomatic-rip exits with an error:
  Error closing renderer
  (/usr/lib/cups/filter/foomatic-rip) stopped with status 1!

When printing a particular PDF file, a rather different error occurs (log excerpt):
  http://www.linetec.nl/linux/cups-error2.txt

Here, I see "/stackoverflow in --aload--", with foomatic-rip exiting with
code 3 instead of code 1.

Does anyone have an idea what may be the problem here? And more importantly, how I can solve it?

Thanks for any hints,

Best regards,

Richard Rasker




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