Subj : Re: Printing does not work reliably under RedHat FC1 with gimp-print and Epson stylus photo 890 printer
To   : comp.os.linux
From : Thomas D. Shepard
Date : Sun Aug 01 2004 10:26 pm

On Sat, 24 Jul 2004 07:52:50 +0000, Jeff Silverman wrote:

> Hi, I am running RedHat Fedora Core 1 with cups and gimp-print using an 
> Epson stylus photo 890 printer connected via USB.  When it works, it is 
> a pleasure and a joy to work with, the equal of anything available under 
> MS-Windoze.

Huh? Only equal!!!? That is pretty bad by Linux standards to be merely
"equal," but I guess it depends on your definition of "equal."

>  But when it fails, the only way to clear the problem seems
> to be to remove the queue from cups, shutdown the printer, cycle power
> on the machine, then recreate the queue.
> 
> When the subsystem hangs, I can try running escputil and it, too, will
> hang.  In fact, a kill -9 will not unhang it, I have to reboot.
> Frequently, when the subsystem hangs, there are two or three perl
> scripts running under the cupsd process.  Fortunately, completely
> cycling power on the printer and machine frequently cures the problem.
> It does seem rather extreme, however.

Did you say "Fortunately!!!?" It looks like you have been using Windoze
way too long. I would consider anything that requires a reboot to fix a
catastrophe (unless I was fooling around with kernel stuff, of course.)(I
assumed that by "machine" you meant the computer running cups.)

Next time try a cups restart instead, via the command

/etc/rc.d/init.d/cups restart

> 
> I am running the 2.4.22-1.2188.nptl  kernel, cups-1.1.19-13,
> gimp-print-4.2.6-4, libusb-0.1.7-3, and foomatic-3.0.0-21.3.
> 
> Does anybody have any good insights?  I am not sure exactly what else to
> look for.

OK. Now I'll get serious and say the following, which I sincerely hope
will help.

Take a look at the cups error (and other) logs, which are probably in
/var/log/cups. See if you can find the messages associated with one of the
problems you are having. The logs probably have time stamps to help you
find what you are looking for.

If the information is not helpful, edit the cups configuration file,
probably in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf. Look for the line that sets LogLevel and
change it to debug. Then restart cups as shown above. The next time you
have a problem there should be a lot of useful information in the log
file. Hopefully that will be soon, or you will have some really big log
files.

The amount of gibberish cups puts in the log file at debug LogLevel may
look daunting, but don't be discouraged. In the past I have been always
been able to find the problem this way. (Never need to use debug2, thank
goodness!) In a couple of cases where the problem was caused by bugs in
the source code, the log info was sufficient that I was easily able to
find the exact line of source code that needed to be fixed.

FWIW, my daughter used to use Appleworks on her iMac which would send
bogus data that would hang my Linux cups print server, unless she printed
from the print preview dialog, in which case proper PDF data were sent. So
it is possible for bad applications to hang cups.

> 
> And if it is any consolation, a lot of my friends who run MS-Windoze
> report that they have frequent printing problems, too.  Printing is, I
> think, a hard problem.
> 
> 
> Jeff

-- 
Thomas D. Shepard
Sorry, you can't email me.
(Email address is fake.)

.