I just obtained a used HP Photosmart 1218 inkjet printer, and according to linuxprinting.org the printer is supposed to be able to work with linux perfectly.
I've added another printer in the past (a Canon BJC-250) which has worked for quite a while on various flavors of Linux, including presently on Debian Etch. I use the parallel interface on that prniter OK. (Although recently, I experienced an odd hang when trying to access this printer, and thanks to recent postings on the list, I found the solution was to comment out a line in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf that says to listen on a socket in /var/run/cups. Commenting out that line and restarting the cups system allows me to print normally. On the other hand, I plugged in this new printer (intending to use USB) and can't get past the setup. Both cups and kDE's print wizard correctly identify the printer; the latter allows me to go as far as "test", at which point it hangs, and cannot be closed except by ctrl-alt-esc. Using the cups admistration tool (pointing $browser to localhost:631) I can't do anything. The printer is detected all right on the USB cable, but if I try to add anything, it just hangs. I then notice a series of cups-related processes (cups-driverd for instance) and these processes just consume CPU resources and have to be killed. I'm thinking that this current behavior is somehow related to the original hangs that I experienced yesterday after trying to print a document (on the Canon, naturally). If they aren't related, is it related to specifically cups packages in debian etch (my system was just aptitude upgraded yesterday morning) or would it be something else? -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ David E. Fox Thanks for letting me [EMAIL PROTECTED] change magnetic patterns [EMAIL PROTECTED] on your hard disk. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]