I bought (a while back) a Xerox Phaser 3110 cheap no brains Laser printer. Or so I thought.
When buying it in the store, the printer was clearly marked as "supporting Linux". I brought it home to my Debian Sid machine, and installed the CUPS driver from the CD. Everything worked fine. A few uninstalls/reinstalls, and port moving (USB to Parallel) laters, and the pritner won't respond any more. It doesn't like me any more, it appears.
I decided to look into matters a little further. At first I thought this was a GDI no brains printer, and that the supplied Linux driver was a proprietary binary driver. Not so, it appears. Despite it's low price, this printer is a PJL (the original LaserJet language) compatibile printer! In fact, the supplied cups "driver" is merely a text file with some definitions. Reinforced with this new piece of information, I set about trying to figure out why the driver won't print any more.
I have found out the following disturbing facts about CUPS at large, and this driver in particular.
- It appears that CUPS don't have any way of directing the end result to file. WTF? I ended up writing a small utility to direct /dev/pts/? to file, and configured CUPS to use that as a driver. As a comparison, Windows had no problem to print to file (once I physically connected the printer - it wouldn't otherwise). Dumping this resulting file via linux to the printer printed with no problems (how do you think I know this is a standard PJL printer?).
- It further appears that when selecting the printer's driver, CUPS will not print anything to the device. It obviously has some old config laying around, but I'll be damned if I knew where, or how to get rid of it.
- I did not manage to find an alternative driver that will produce PJL. Selecting "LaserJet" produced some other obscure language, which was obviously not PJL.
If anyone has any idea how to perform one of the following:
- Remove the lock that disallows me to use the vendor supplied "driver". I have tried dpkg -P cupsys in my desperation, to no avail.
- Find another source of PJL language. I have not even managed to find the proper command line to produce output in lj5mono format from ghostscript (I have tried "gs -sDEVICE=lj5mono file.ps", to no avail).
HELP! I've been printing solely from Windows for several months now, and it's a real pain!
Shachar
-- Shachar Shemesh Open Source integration consultant Home page & resume - http://www.shemesh.biz/
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