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In getting a few ACME items ready for Penguicon I had to print a few things. But I've had rotten luck with getting CUPS to do more than print a test page, so I wound using the PowerBook for that. After a while that began to gnaw at me. OS X has what I consider to be a few deficiencies or at least unnecessary goofinesses, so I went to see if I could get belgian to print.
To my surprise, CUPS seemed to have found all the printers that are available. Getting hopeful, I opened AbiWord and tried to print something. Success! But that was on a Deskjet. No such luck with the Laserjet. CUPS said it was successful. The lights on the printer blinked. And... nothing prints. I tried printing a test page and that worked. Strange. Getting suspicious (or desperate?) I tried printing from OpenOffice. That worked. But I still couldn't print to the Laserjet from AbiWord. I could print to .pdf and then have KGhostView print that.
This is annoying, but less annoying than not being able to print at all from belgian. What, beyond massive size, does OpenOffice have that AbiWord does not? It looked like my choice was to use the oversized and annoyingly slow to open OpenOffice or do a silly work-around with AbiWord.
Even stranger, this morning I tried again and I can print to the Laser printer directly from AbiWord now. I like that it's working, but I'd really like to know what changed overnight. Things that mysteriously don't work, then mysteriously start working bother me. How do I know it won't mysteriously stop working again?
EDIT: My concern was justified. AbiWord isn't printing to the Laserjet now.
I want to smash CUPS
4 May 2007 17:55When I made the switch from Mandrake (and I was running Mandrake, not Mandriva) to Fedora Core I lost the ability to print. I tried to rectify that a while ago and ran into that which is CUPS. The Common Unix Printing System is a nice idea that is a pain to set up and should not be. Eric S. Raymond wrote a rant about his experience trying to make CUPS work in early 2004.
Today I decided to try again. By strange coincidence, Eric S. Raymond called ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
jmaynard inquiring about setting up printing with KDE, just as I was attempting the same. My reaction was that "It still doesn't work!"
I did eventually find a web page that told me what file to edit and how and so did that. Then came the joy of restarting CUPS. This was simple, once I went to the command line. The wonderful KDE GUI which I generally like managed to hide information too well. And then I got to the local CUPS web interface and, eventually, made that work. It took a few tries. Once, it looked like thing were working but nothing printed. That's not good. An error message is annoying, but at least it says something happened, or failed to happen. Silent failure is a Bad Thing. Another try with a different option and the printer, at long last, took off.
All this took far too long. ESR called a bit later about another matter and said he had gotten things working about the same way.
I'm glad that I can print again, but annoyed it took that amount of fiddling around to get there.
