Re: [tlug] Printer Not Responding

["Josh Glover" <jmglov@example.com>]

On 20/04/06, Dave M G <martin@example.com> wrote:

> I used Stephen's suggestion for a command:
> dave@example.com:~$ sudo G_SLICE=always-malloc /usr/bin/printconf
> Password:
> sudo: G_SLICE=always-malloc: command not found
> ... but as you can see, the result was not very helpful.

I don't think that Scott's suggestion is going to solve your printer
problem (in fact, I doubt that he thinks so, either; he was likely
just sharing a work-around he had found for the error message that you
posted), but I know what is wrong with the above picture.

The "G_SLICE=always-malloc" bit is the Bourne shell way to set an
environment variable in local scope (i.e. it will not be available to
any programs except for the one that is being run with the environment
variable setting).

When using environment variables in conjunction with sudo, you need to
set them *before* "sudo" in the invocation. So what you want to do is:

G_SLICE=always-malloc sudo /usr/bin/printconf

That is likely to clear up the gcc error, if your environment is
similar enough to Scott's. It is unlikely to shed any light on your
printing problems.

> I'm a little confused as to what steps I should be attempting next.

I am also at a loss. Everything about your setup seems OK to me.
Cranking up the debugging in the CUPS config log did not accomplish
the goal of giving us a juicy error message to feed to Google.

Are there any models of Canon printers that *do* have drivers on
LinuxPrinting.org? Are any of them for printers that are at all
similar to yours? Sometimes you get lucky, and there is a driver for a
model 660 printer, and you have a 675, and the "wrong" driver works
well enough.

I guess the other thing to try would be doing some very directed
Google searches, with the exact model of your printer, "unbuntu", and
"dapper" as keywords. Of course, you may have already tried this.

> And while I appreciate the logic behind Stephen's advocacy of open
> source drivers, my suspicions are still that Dapper has in some way
> changed its handling of USB. This is because the printer was working
> without flaw in Ubuntu 5.10.

That is extremely unlikely. But check the differences, if you have any
way to do so, between versions of CUPS and foomatic and so on used in
5.10 and Dapper. Maybe one of the Unbuntu or Debian users on the list
can tell you how to do this--I imagine it is just a matter of a few
apt commands or maybe even a search of a web database.

Sorry that I cannot be of more help. CUPS, as I said, is damned
frustrating when it does not work.

-Josh