ghostscript cups epson ... contemplating suicide

[antineutrino]

I can't get my printer to work on my own. I need help.
today for example I spent 4 hours scouring various forums and I have come to the conclusion that I hate cups!


now. here's the problem:
I have an epson stylus photo 950 (== epson stylus photo 960) and I can't print.
Over the last 5 weeks I have had every combination of "client-error-not-possible" "can't convert file 0 to printable format" and "renderer exiting with error XXX" error messages there are.

I can print with
echo "hello world" > /dev/lp0 or whatever it is.
but I can't print test pages from localhost:631

I have tried the epkowa drivers as well as gimp-print.

I reinstalled everything several times and started from scratch... no result.

I have ended up with no error messages whatsoever, but the jobs just won't stop processing...

and
a status of "Printing page 1, 6%" followed by "Parallel port busy; will retry in 30 seconds..." on the gimp-print drivers

and "Processing page 1..." with epkowa

in both cases it never leaves the "processing stage"


even with "loglevel debug" I'm not getting anything meaningful

I don't even know what information to give you so you can help me.
*sniff*


any suggestions of what do do next?

thanks

[Master Shake]

If your using gnome there is a printer-setup util that you can emerge. I believe its called gnomeprint, I'm on a windows computer so I can't look it up right now. Emerge that and follow its easy instructions (yes they are easy). It uses cups and it made my lexmark work, with its respective drivers of course.
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System Specs:
64-bit gentoo linux
Q6600 @ 3.2Ghz
P35 Chipset
4 Gigs 800mhz 4-4-4-12
Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX @ 630mhz