Printing working on debian, at last (Shallow Thoughts)

Printing working on debian, at last

After a year of no printing on sid, I went back to sarge to see if I could still print from there.

When I dist-upgraded my ancient sarge, one of the questions it asked me was whether to replace printers.conf. That sounded suspicious: I saved the old printers.conf, then allowed it to replace it with its new version.

Well, sure enough, with the new printers.conf it didn't know about my Epson, and when I went to the cups admin url to add it, there was no "add printer" button. Just like I'd always seen in sid.

In sid, someone once gave me the direct url to "add a printer", but when I followed it, I didn't get a working setup anyway. I decided to try copying my old printers.conf on top of the new one.

And voila, it worked! Printing works okay from sarge. (It still has the problem of the cups test page outlines not aligning well with the physical printer page, so it may not work for printing labels, but it's a start.)

So I moved over to sid, and tried the same printers.conf. Voila, something came out of the printer, the first I've ever seen that happen from sid! It didn't entirely work: I printed a few lines using lpr, and the printer printed those lines but then didn't eject the page, and I had to wrestle with the printer to get the paper out. So all is not quite well in sid land, but it's much farther along than it was using only the tools available in sid (rather than my two-year-old printers.conf originally configured on a much older sarge).

The other interesting file that upgrade asked me about was epson.conf, which turns out to be for the epson scanner, not the epson printer. Perhaps by using that (I saved the old sarge file) I'll eventually be able to get scanning working on sid! That would be lovely. For now, I'm using sarge a lot more.

Tags: linux, debian, printing
[ 23:09 Jul 20, 2004    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]