[ale] Printing problems

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Sat, 2007-06-23 at 13:38 -0400, Scott Castaline wrote:

> Sometime way back I had tried to upgrade hplip to version 1.7.4a and
> was 
> unsuccessful so decided to revert back to the original version I had
> on 
> my FC6 system. Since then I have had strange problems with printing
> that 
> is inconsistent, depending upon what I'm printing and through which 
> application. I want to try to rebuild by first removing than 
> reinstalling the printer system. What all do I need to be concerned
> with 
> aside from cups and hplip? 


Probably the package manager.

I don't quite know how RPM does things, because I try very hard to stay
away from it (much for the same reasons that ESR finally gave up on it,
though I gave up on it way before he did).  However, I do know that the
Debian package system will let you reinstall software while retaining
the configuration (e.g., sudo apt-get remove cupsys, which is used to
uninstall the CUPS printing system, will retain the CUPS configuration
files; sudo apt-get --purge remove cupsys is required to also remove the
configuration files).  This is useful if you want to, for example,
replace the binary package with a locally-compiled package that wants to
take advantage of the same configuration files.

If RPM has such a system that retains the configuration files after
uninstalling a package, then you should watch out for that and ensure
that RPM removes any configuration files that are installed by the
printing subsystems.

You may also, for completeness, wish to remove the rest of the printing
system.  I don't know how inter-connected hplip is with the rest of the
printing utilities, but I do know that CUPS uses (in many distributions)
its own version of Ghostscript (ESP Ghostscript), which is often
installed alongside GNU or GPL Ghostscript.  There is also GIMP-Print,
which CUPS can use as an output driver, but I don't think that there is
any relationship between it and hplip, since they both perform the same
function---just different ways.  You may want to simply check what all
of the dependencies are of both CUPS and hplip and remove them all,
along with configuration files, and then reinstall them all from
scratch.

An aside:  I have had extremely good results printing from Ubuntu to
various printers, including those supported by the hplip drivers.  I
have found that CUPS is a pretty finicky system, though, and works
perfectly fine for me on Ubuntu and some other distributions that I have
tried---but is pretty much useless (at least for my purposes) on FreeBSD
with my USB-connected laser printer.  Given how finicky CUPS is, though,
it is entirely possible that the problem might lie somewhere therein,
even if that's not where the problem should be.

    --- Mike

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Michael B. Trausch
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