[Techtalk] printer help needed

[Akkana]

Conni writes:
> I'm running RedHat 7.2, with Ximian Desktop/Gnome/sawfish.  Default
[ ... ]
> First, I su'ed.  Then I ran printtool, which runs printconf-gui.  I added
> a new printer, and it detected the Epson USB printer.  Only in the list of
[ ... ]
> So I googled, found linuxprinting.org, and looked up documentation
> relevant to this printer.  It was recommended to use cups and gimp-print
> to get this printer working.  To install cups, you must first uninstall
> all other printing things, like lpr.  This is where the problems start.

I had a lot of problems printing to my Epson (Photo 700) from Redhat
7.2.  My understanding is that their Epson filters are fairly broken
(there are two or three printing updates on redhat.com, but I installed
all of them with the result that instead of printing garbage, printing
would just hang).  I installed LPRng rather than CUPS (I haven't had
much luck with CUPS in the past, though I hear it's improving).

In the end, I finally got printing working, and here is what I have:

>From the RH 7.2 update site:
  LPRng-3.7.4-28
  Omni-0.5.0-4.i386.rpm
  Omni-foomatic-0.5.0-4.i386.rpm
  printconf-0.3.52-1.i386.rpm
  printconf-gui-0.3.52-1.i386.rpm
  foomatic-1.1-0.20011018.7.i386.rpm
ghostscript-6.51-16 (I think this came from rpmfind.net)
ghostscript-fonts-5.50-3 (maybe also rpmfind?)
gimp-print-4.2.0 (source tarball from gimp-print.sourceforge.net)
  (4.2.1 is out now, I'd probably downlad that)

Hmm, that foomatic doesn't look like a RH RPM name, I must have
gotten foomatic from somewhere else.  The Omni stuff probably doesn't
matter, except that I had to download them to satisfy dependencies
from the other Redhat RPMs.

I've listed them in the order I think I installed them.  I think the
order may be important; several of these programs have their own sets of
print filters and they may overwrite each other.  I trust gimp-print most
(that project rocks! and I wanted to make sure I had the good filters for
photo printing) so I made sure I built and installed it last.

I'd recommend first reinstalling any printing packages from your
CD set that you think might possibly have been damaged when RPM hung.

Of course my printer isn't the same model as yours, so no guarantees,
but it's worth a try.  Too bad setting up printing is so complicated!

	...Akkana