Constantine 'Gus' Fantanas wrote:
richard (MQ) wrote:
Constantine 'Gus' Fantanas wrote:
The printer prints the test page from inside YAST perfectly well. And it also prints the test page from inside the CUPS administration tool (http://127.0.0.1:631) without any problem, even the fine radial lines 1 degree apart. It also works fine from inside openoffice. But when I try to print from inside firefox or Thunderbird, it seems it wants to print the Postscript instructions rather than executing them.
Problem is not known by me.
I have the same problems with an old HP laserjet, both on AMD64 and i386 installations (and various SuSE / openSuSE versions since about 9.3 right up to 10.2. Yet to try it in 10.3a2). Solution was to select a different PPD during YaST install - I usually use LJ5 - then it all works nicely.
What was the name of the (bad) PPD?
The printer in question is displayed as CUPS/xxxxx. I did some more troubleshooting by watching the output of 'tail -n 200 -f /var/log/cups/error_log' and 'tail -n 200 -f /var/log/cups/access_log'. In the former (which apparently does not log only errors but also other important information),
Just set "LogLevel debug" in file /etc/cups/cupsd.conf (and dont forget to do the "rccups force-reload").
The steps are always the same: invoke 'pstops', then the 'foomatic-rip' filter, and then the 'socket' backend. I guess this is done by the PPD file for the printer. So, with exactly the same sequence, the firefox output on the printer is PS commands (garbage) while the output of the test files is what it should be.
You might got installed the wrong driver (PPD file). There are printer models, which have a PostScript interpreter and others (with the same name) dont have. Maybe installation of a different driver (PPD file) is the solution?
Going further, I asked firefox to print to a file. Here it gets interesting. If I open the file with KGhostscript and then print it from inside KGHostscript, the file prints fine! If I do the same from other PS viewers (e.g. 'gv'), the output is garbage again. I also get the same garbage if I queue a PDF file directly to the printer.
All this seems to point towards some incompatibility of the Postscript format with the 'foomatic-rip' filter. It seems that KGhostview somehow makes some (perhaps minor) reformatting, which makes its output compatible with the 'foomatic-rip' filter.
'foomatic-rip' hasn't changed much between 10.0 and 10.3a2 (only a few lines), so I doubt that this the origin of the issue. Other things have changed more: cups, ghostscript, drivers.
I have done sooooo much googling trying to solve this problem! I think I read somewhere that the 'foomatic-rip' filter should be avoided. I am not sure where I read it. The driver invoked by CUPS is the generic 'Foomatic/hpijs' driver, which is provided by HP and is used on many other HP printers. I guess it was the same driver I was using under SuSE 10.0_x64.
hpijs is changing recently. So I doubt that it is the same driver used in 10.3a2 and 10.0. I think best solution is to open a new bugzilla at https://bugzilla.novell.com/ and explain the full issue there. (Dont forget to choose "Printing" as Component :-) Another helpful source of information is http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:CUPS_in_a_Nutshell Regards, Klaus. -- Klaus Singvogel SUSE LINUX Products GmbH Maxfeldstr. 5 E-Mail: Klaus.Singvogel@SuSE.de 90409 Nuernberg Phone: +49 (0) 911 740530 Germany GnuPG-Key-ID: 1024R/5068792D 1994-06-27 SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nuernberg) --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-amd64+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-amd64+help@opensuse.org