[Techtalk] re: printer problems

[Akkana Peck]

I'm coming in late on this ...

> On Wednesday 07 January 2004 10:31, Berenice Chong wrote:
> > I use RedHat 8 LPRng printing system and I'm trying to get my printer
> > (a Canon BJC-265SP) to actually print something. 

In a later message, Berenice writes:
> Yep, lpd is running but I've found the problem seems to be coming
> from a shared library, ie:   
> 
> cupsd: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.4: cannot open
> shared object file: No such file or directory

Um, wait.  You said you were using LPRng ... so why is cupsd running?
LPRng and CUPS should be mutually exclusive.  Or did I miss a message
where you uninstalled lprng and switched to cups?

If they're both running at once, one of them might have a lock on the
parallel port, or on some other resource.

Back to the original message:

> On Wednesday 07 January 2004 10:31, Berenice Chong wrote:
> > If I use the cmd line to print, I get the following:
> >
> > [arashi at rgveda arashi]$ lpr /home/arashi/CSC2406/README
> > Status Information:
> >  sending job 'arashi at rgveda+113' to canon at localhost
> >  connecting to 'localhost', attempt 1
> >  cannot open connection to localhost - Connection refused
> > Make sure the remote host supports the LPD protocol
> > and accepts connections from this host and from non-privileged
> > (>1023) ports

That looks like it's trying to print over the network (but not the
real network, just the loopback network that lets the machine talk to
itself).  If the printer is local, shouldn't it be trying to talk to
a parallel port or a usb port?  If it's not local, then it should be
talking to a particular hostname, not localhost.

What that message is saying is that the local printing system (lprng
or cups) is trying to make a network connection to the print server
on localhost (which is the current machine), and that connection is
failing because there's no print server running on localhost.  

Perhaps go back through the printer's configuration and make sure that
it's set up to talk to a local printer (or to the correct hostname if
it's on a network).

(Though I'm no printing expert either -- I've always had good luck with
lprng under Redhat except for 7.2, but I can't manage to get Debian
unstable to print to my epson no matter what I do.  I think the next
step is to uninstall all Debian-related printing packages and install
lprng or cups from source.)

	...Akkana