Printing problems under suse 11.4

[tkm]

Hello All,

I have curious problem. I have installed a printer on my laptop that was a Canon Pixma IP5200R.
On my desktop I installed a HP OfficeJet G95 (very old but working).

They both accept print jobs but after the first page problems begin.
On the top of the page a thin horizontal stripe is printed. After about half the page it print text over other text. It becomes one black blur at the end. If I more pages are printed the effect gets worse. Both printers have the same effect.
Both printers are network connected.

I have a old laptop with suse 11.3 on it, that prints fine with the OfficeJet.

Regards,

Theo

[ceaus]

I'm having the exact same problem with a Canon Pixma 4500 on openSUSE 11.4.

I'm using the Turboprint driver. Have tried the genereic Gutenprint/berg drivers with same results. Please post back if you get it solved!

Thanks,
Koos

[tkm]

This weekend I was digging in the wiki of OpenSuse.
Found this page en.opensuse.org/Portal:Printing
And found the article below:

Various printout failures with CUPS default "RIPCache 8m"

By default CUPS has only 8 MB RIPCache, see "RIPCache" at cups.org/documentation.php/doc-1.4/ref-cupsd-conf.html

This default exits since a long time and did not cause any issue. But since a few month more and more weird issues regarding printout failures happen which are related to this low default. The root cause is that recent versions of Ghostscript changed the internal banding API but the CUPS raster driver was not updated accordingly in Ghostscript.

For example there might be no printout at all because "/usr/lib/cups/filter/pstoraster failed" or there is broken printout like in the attachment 380232 in the Novell/openSUSE Bugzilla.

If printout failures actually depend on the low default RIPCache value, it helps to add in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf a line like

RIPCache 128m

and restart the cupsd afterwards. Then the CUPS raster driver in Ghostscript gets more memory available so that rendering is done in full page mode and not in banding mode which avoids issues because of the changed banding API.

In some cases (probably only for color printing at high resolution with the Gutenprint driver) you may have to specify much more, e.g. 1GB with

RIPCache 1024m

of course provided you have at least 2GB main memory in your computer.

I tried it and it solved my problems.
This article was somewhere in middle of the page according to me it deserved a headline.

Regards,

Theo

[gbburkhardt]

I've had a similar problem, and adding "RIPCache 128m" at the bottom of 'cupsd.conf' worked for me, too. Thanks so much for posting the solution.

[ceaus]

Excellent investigation Theo! I punched it in and I'm printing again.
Thanks a bunch.
Koos

[mhismail]

Hi guys,
I am certainly delighted to see your exchanges regarding printing issues you encountered and solved. However, I noted that you guys are computer techy (by the way you discussed this issue), which I am not a techy guy! Many of what you discussed sound greek to me. I really hope to get a layman's response, should I post issues in the future. I would like to learn and dont mind starting from first grade material, so to speak.

[ceaus]

In my experience the online Linux community is pretty relaxed. So just go ahead ask. We wil help you.

Koos

[gbburkhardt]

Suse has released an update to Cups that fixes this problem. It doesn't use the same technique, but it works.

I've been having other problems with the 11.4 release, and have abandoned it for the time being. I've replaced that installation with Ubuntu. There were problems with starting Emacs after "su" (must use "su -"), and my sound stopped working.