Printing Problem (KDE/Driver)

trashman · n00b Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 22 Location: Cleveland, OH

A few months ago, I had printing working fine.

I have an EPSON Stylus Color 8(cubed) connected to an Apple AirPort Base Station. Then, some update must have broken it, because it suddenly could only print one page at a time. Other pages besides the first are blank.

More recently, there was something seriously wrong. It stopped printing alltogether.

When I attempt to choose a driver through the Printers panel in Control Center, an error appears:

"Unable to start the creation of the driver database. The execution of make_driver_db_cups failed."

Click OK, and the same message pops up again. But click OK again, and the Model Selection window appears. Then, when I tried to choose a printer and a driver another error appears that says something like:

"Unable to load the requested driver: Unable to create the Foomatic driver [HP-LaserJet_1320,Postscript]. Either that driver does not exist, or you don't have the required permissions to perform that operation."

:evil:

Following the advice of these people, I tried to run foomatic-cleanupdrivers, but apparently this was not installed with foomatic-db-engine for whatever reason. So, I manually compile it, and run it.

Suddenly, I can select my driver again, and I can print... one page at a time.

The "Unable to start the creation of the driver database." error still appears, too. I don't mean to ramble, but there are a lot of problems here. All I really want is to be able to print multiple pages. Can someone help? :cry:

potatoface · Guru Joined: 18 Feb 2004 Posts: 542 Location: ::7F00:1

i recently had a similar problem, after i had a working printer, it stopped working....
i solved it by installing a new printer with cups on http://localhost:631
or you could try to look at the USE flags, maybe some have changed....
potatoface
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lpetersen · Posted: Wed Jun 14, 2006 10:24 am Post subject:

Same problem here, with a variety of printer drivers (HP Laserjet 2100 PCL and Postscript, HP Deskjet 1220C hpijs, Brother HL1470N Postscript) ... I reemerged all foomatic-related packages, kdelibs-3.5.3-r1, and kdeprint-3.5.3, and still no solution.

Re-installing a printer from the http interface of cups is possible, but still in the kprinter dialog, whenever I select "Properties..." of the printer, the line "kdeprint: WARNING: PPD syntax error, PPD parse failed" is output to the console (just try it by starting kprinter from a konsole window), and in the cofiguration dialog popping up, the Tab "Driver settings" (where you can configure, e.g., print quality etc.) is not shown, and the "General" Tab doesn't show, e.g., the printer specific media choice it used to offer.

(Btw., that error message even appears when trying to set up the Properties of the cups-pdf printer!)

Are we the only ones experiencing this? Has anybody found a solution?

Al_Kane · n00b Joined: 19 Jan 2005 Posts: 13

There is a problem with CUPS-1.2.* and KDEprint-3.5.* that is described in this KDE developer's post --> http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1901

From that post:

Al_Kane · n00b Joined: 19 Jan 2005 Posts: 13

Update to my post above.

I can now print via kdeprint and cups. I solved my problem by re-emerging kde-base/kdelibs-3.5.3-r2. (Also, I don't need to comment out the 'Listen /var/run/cups/cups.sock' line).

However, I still cannot add printers through the KDE print manager (probably due to the cups and kdeprint problem in my previous post). For the meantime, I'll manage and add printers through http://localhost:631/admin.

lpetersen · Posted: Thu Jun 22, 2006 7:19 am Post subject:

lpetersen · Posted: Mon Jul 24, 2006 7:12 pm Post subject:

Finally!

After all, I solved my problem. The solution was a simple as it is embarrassing. I replaced -O3 with -O2 in my C(XX)FLAGS ... :oops:

I always thought using just the preconfigured optimization levels was pretty safe except where explicitly warned against ... Well, seems like kdelibs is one such picky package where -O3 actually breaks things (at least with gcc-4.1.1). Hope this might help somebody not to fall into the same trap. :wink:

tld · l33t Joined: 09 Dec 2003 Posts: 681

Oh man...you saved me with this one. I was going nuts trying to figure out why that properties page generated that "PPD parse failed" error on the machine I'm using as a print server but not from another gentoo box printing to it. The machine I was using as a print server was set for -O3.

People here warned me about that -O3 and they were definately right.

Tom