SillyDog701

[Edward]

The other evening, I realized there were problems printing in Linux. Initially, this had been limited to Opera, however it also occurred with Adobe Acrobat Reader, and this was on both of my Linux systems, running SuSE 9.1.

When something does not print, I open the print job listing, click the icon for all jobs, and the print that did not come out was marked "aborted". When I go into the IPP report, it shows "aborted-by-system".

I looked in /var/log/cups and forwarded part of the log to a friend. He noticed

E [15/Jun/2004:19:26:23 -0400] Bad request line "request id is styluscolor640-103 (1 file(s))"!

and stated that data being sent to the filter is bad.

Since this is happening on two different systems, with different applications, I can only guess that it appears to be a Linux issue. I found updated CUPS drivers via YaST as part of a download of files pertaining to ghostscript, but the updated drivers did not solve this problem. The printer on the other system is an Epson Stylus Color 400. The printer referenced in the above quote is the Stylus Color 640. The 640 is capable of being connected either via USB or the parallel port, however the connection did not matter as it coocurred when it was connected to both types on different occasions.

Mozilla uses the LPR command to print, and I have not had aborted print jobs with that.

Does anyone have a clue as to why these print jobs are aborting?

Opera has an option to add in a printer command which when added, will appear in the Print window as a separate item.

When I add such an option, lpr -Pstyluscolor400 is the command sent to the printer. In this instance, the job does not appear in the print jobn listing mentioned above, but even with this, the first couple of print jobs will print, then nothing. It doesn't matter whether it is a web page, or an e-mail message.

The print system used is CUPS, and the driver used is CUPS+gimp_print.

Before I decide to go back to Windows permanently, is there anything that I should look at?

UserAgent: Opera/7.51 (X11; Linux i586; U) [en]

[Phoenix21692]

Hmm...did you get the printer working on SuSE Linux 9.1 or 9.0 before? Which port did you always use for printing? USB?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040514

[Edward]

The Stylus Color 400 printer was always connected via the parallel port.

The Stylus Color 640 on the other system can connect via USB or parallel, it will work both ways, and the problem occurred regardless of how the 640 was connected.

I did not have this problem with either SuSE 8.2 or 9.0. This started with 9.1. The printers worked perfectly. Where 9.1 uses the 2.6 kernel, I'm curious as to whether that might have something to do with it, as 8.2 and 9.0 uses the 2.4 kernel which actually ran faster on both machines.

UserAgent: Opera/7.51 (X11; Linux i586; U) [en]

[Edward]

SuSE 9.0 would not allow a full downgrade from 9.1 to 9.0 ad 4 packages were incompatible, including CUPS (printing!), so I am in the process of installing SuSE 9.0 on the Pentium. If it works on that, and I expect that it will, then I will put 9.0 on the other machine this weekend.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.9

[Edward]

Just finished installing SuSE 9.0 on the 166 MHz Penrium system.

First off, there was a PC100 128 Mb DIMM inside that which I removed last weekend, the system was so bogged down running SuSE 9.1 that it was amazing that anything ran at all. The other memory were PC66 SIMM modules, which forced the PC100 DIMM to run at 66 MHz.

Removing that PC100 DIMM, which reduced the RAM from 229 Mb down to 98 Mb, and installing SuSE 9.0 from scratch, has resuulted in a couple of interesting things.

!. So far, everything I have sent to the printer (Epson Stylus Color 400) has printed perfectly, including items that did not print as reported above.

2. SuSE 9.0 on this system, is now faster than 9.1 on the K6-2 system which has a 500 MHz CPU.

Pleasantly surprised.

UserAgent: Opera/7.51 (X11; Linux i586; U) [en]

[Phoenix21692]

I'm glad it's working on the older version. It looks like you should stick with SUSE Linux 9.0 for the time being. A possibility is that your printers might not be supported under the newer kernel from SUSE Linux 9.1. But that's just an assumption. I wonder people have the same problems with those kinds of printers on MandrakeLinux 10.0.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040616

[Edward]

I reinstalled 9.0 on the K6-2 system yesteday, and have not encountered the printing problems I had with 9.1.

9.0 (probably due to the 2.4.x kernel) also runs considerably faster on both machines than 9.1 did.

9.1 supports both of the Epson printers I have, but oddly enough, if I used Mozilla to print a web page, it printed fine. Mozilla uses the lpr command, but I don't see how that would have made a difference since Adobe uses it, and (if input) Opera will, but in both instances, the print job was aborted by the system (the indication of bad data going to the filter).

UserAgent: Opera/7.51 (X11; Linux i586; U) [en]

[Phoenix21692]

In that case, the printing didn't work on Opera in SUSE 9.1, but did work in 9.0? That's really odd.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040616

[Edward]

It is strange. Apart from the 2.6 kernel, the printer driver used in 9.1, CUPS+gimp_print, was version 4.2.6. SuSE 9.0 came with version 4.2.5 of the same driver.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040616