[Pkg-cups-devel] Cups broken in etch after latest upgrade

[smsms at gmx.de]

Hi there,

I can't print any more. /var/log/error_log :

E [16/Jun/2006:00:16:42 +0200] Unable to open listen socket for address :::631 - Address family not supported by protocol.

(that was before printing after I opened the web interface)

Then I open the web interface and try to print a test page (for testing purposes, of course, I tried to print my normal documents before and got very frustrated, since nothing works any more)

Web Interface says 

"Printer not connected; will retry in 30 seconds..." (which is not true, since I can print under Windoze and could print before I pulled in the latest cups packages)

Using top I find three jobs that could be related and that keep hanging there:

lp        18   0 21796  14m 3908 S  0.0  2.8   0:00.57 gs-esp             
lp        19   0 11208 8032 1392 S  0.0  1.6   0:01.22 rastertogutenpr    
lp        16   0  3024  700  548 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.00 parallel          



I run Debian Etch and frequently upgrade to the latest packages. I have a laserjet 4 printer and before the latest packages it worked. Other times when I try to print a ps document the gs-esp job is missing in top and only the other two jobs show up.


I could have posted this to normal bug reports, but I wanted to add a few things. I usually am a very happy Debian user. Except for one thing. Printing under Debian has been a nightmare often times.

I filed a bug report against Sarge that I deemed very important that never got fixed (I thought being able to print a pdf that is a little larger, like more than 15 MB is important):
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=298249

Under Sarge I also had the problem that printing stopped working as soon as I installed the xprint package (what the fudge that was all about I never found out, I just deinstalled xprint, but that took me quite a while to figure out).

My printer supports letter format, but living in Germany I don't have access to it and really don't want to use it, since A4 is the standard over here. But Cups has no option to always send A4 even if some other program hands a letter formated job to it (convert the document before sending). So every time I forget to tell some program that I would not like to use letter the printer takes the job and then asks me to load letter format into the paper tray. I have to switch off the printer and switch it on again. I also have to kill the job. That requires root. For some reason Firefox and Xpdf were at some point (it used to work in Firefox and not in Xpdf and now Firefox is broken as well) only sending letter formated jobs even though I set every available option to A4. Same with the lp command that used to only send letter formated jobs to the printer. Because programmers are so sloppy to hardcode letter format into their apps again and again I have to live with a partly broken system.


Over all I have the feeling that printing seems to have a VERY low priority for Debian and I am very sad about this. The current situation, in which I have to boot to Windows to print things reconfirms that. I am sorry to vent my frustration in this forum, but printing in Debian has been broken for me for the nth time and I use Debian as my primary workstation.


thx,

Malte
-- 


"Feel free" – 10 GB Mailbox, 100 FreeSMS/Monat ...
Jetzt GMX TopMail testen: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/topmail