Help getting a printer working

celloandy · Posted: Tue Sep 07, 2004 5:32 am Post subject: Help getting a printer working

So I just bought a Samsung ML-1740 printer, and am trying to get it working. It prints test pages, and works fine under Windows, but I've had not luck under linux thus far. I followed the cups directions in the docs, and am using a PPD from linuxprinting.org (actually for the 1710, but people on the forums indicate that this one works with this printer). Anyway, I've added the printer on the web interface, but if I try to print, nothing happens. No errors are reported, either, on screen or in the cups logs, and the Jobs queue shows everything as being completed. /dev/usblp0 exists, but sending stuff to it with cat doesn't print anything either (although it doesn't produce an error). I'm using kernel 2.6.8 on amd64, with a current cups version. Help! Since there's no error, I have no idea what's not working. What should I do?

Andrew

Rav70 · l33t Joined: 11 Feb 2004 Posts: 607 Location: Poland

First try to edit /etc/cups/cupsd.conf, find the LogLevel directive and change it to:

celloandy · Posted: Tue Sep 07, 2004 7:56 pm Post subject:

No errors showed up... it said the job completed. I looked in /dev, again, though, and noticed that /dev/usblp0 seems to be a regular file (ls -l shows up with permissions of -rw-r--r-- instead of crw-rw---- like most of the devices), and it has a bunch of data in it, as if cups just wrote the data it was trying to print to a file called usblp0... I'm not sure. I'm using udev, and I'm not sure if usblp0 was there or not before I got cups up and running. Is it possible that udev is messed up or something, or that the printer didn't really get detected? Any thoughts?

Andrew

Rav70 · l33t Joined: 11 Feb 2004 Posts: 607 Location: Poland

celloandy · Posted: Wed Sep 08, 2004 12:19 am Post subject:

Permissions are already set like that, and cupsd is running as root (is that not right?) Anyway, the other reason I thought there might be something that might be screwed up with /dev/usblp0 is that if I run, as is suggested in the docs,

PowerFactor · Posted: Wed Sep 08, 2004 1:49 am Post subject:

Yep, your /dev/usblp0 is a regular file. You might as well delete it because it isn't doing you any good like that. :wink:

If it exists at all, /dev/usblp0 should be a symlink to /dev/usb/lp0. /dev/usb/lp0 should have permissions "crw-rw---- 1 root lp"

Do you have usb printer support in your kernel, either builtin or as a module?

celloandy · Posted: Wed Sep 08, 2004 8:11 pm Post subject:

Usb printer support is builtin, and dmesg shows

PowerFactor · Posted: Wed Sep 08, 2004 8:28 pm Post subject:

Well, assuming you've followed all the proper guides to get udev working, it's possible you could be suffering from this bug.

celloandy · Posted: Wed Sep 08, 2004 11:45 pm Post subject:

udevstart doesn't make either a usb directory or usblp0 appear (I deleted the file as suggested), so I don't think that's it. I did notice, however, that unplugging the thing and plugging it back in doesn't make dmesg print anything new (it should, shouldn't it?). Still don't really know.

Andrew

PowerFactor · Posted: Wed Sep 08, 2004 11:50 pm Post subject:

Yes you should see something when plugging and unplugging, if the printer is on at least. My printer doesn't show up until I turn it on and it goes away again when I turn it off. So if the printer is off I don't see anything when I plug and unplug it either.

celloandy · Posted: Thu Sep 09, 2004 4:12 am Post subject:

I tried booting with Gnoppix, and found that the thing wasn't autodetected, but that as soon as I loaded usblp, the thing responded. I rebuilt my kernel with usblp as a module, and with devfs enabled, just to play around. Not sure if this helped or not... but it doesn't work with devfs, either. I do the modprobe, and dmesg shows that it sees a printer (although the message in dmesg is different than it was with Gnoppix), but no device shows up in /dev. At least with devfs, there's a usb directory, but there's never anything in it. Still not sure...

Andrew

celloandy · Posted: Thu Sep 09, 2004 4:40 am Post subject:

Never mind, fixed it. I have a VIA chipset on my mb, and the trick was to switch from OHCI to UHCI in kernel. Not sure why, exactly, but apparently you're supposed to UHCI with VIA chipsets. So nice of them to tell me in the docs... in any case, it's fixed. Thanks, everybody, for your help.

Andrew