Weird printer problem

English Hardware
1

I’ve got a Lexmark C500 laser printer attached through the network. It doesn’t work at all with the C500n postscript drivers, but I’ve always managed to get it running with the C500 foo2slx drivers. It’s running right now perfectly on my laptop running linux mint, but on OpenSuSE its only partially functional. Using the same settings, it will print fine in monochrome mode, but if I turn on colour it won’t print at all, the printer doesn’t even register a job has been sent.

Any ideas?

2

I can only think that the ‘foo2slx’ driver files might be worth comparing between distros…

Edit:

Using the same settings, it will print fine in monochrome mode, but if I turn on colour it won’t print at all, the printer doesn’t even register a job has been sent.

I had a read of this page:

http://foo2slx.rkkda.com/

where they mention

Now create printer entries for your spooler. Create at least one queue for monochrome, and another queue for color printing. Create the queues first, then edit them and set the device options as desired.

I wonder if its a queue config issue? I’m not familiar with this hardware/driver. Hope info is helpful.

3

Thanks for the quick response!

I compiled the driver myself from source. I had it working on a previous install of OpenSuSE 11.2 using the same method, which is why this is so weird.

Yeah, that’s exactly how I have it set up. I have a mono and colour queue. If I print the the mono queue, no problem, if I print to the colour queue, no go. If I change the driver settings in the colour queue back to mono, it works straight away…

4

With the colour queue set, try printing and then have a look at whats reported (if anything) in /var/log/cups/error_log file. I would also try a test print via CUPS inerface:

http://localhost:631/

5

The error_log reports “completed successfully”.

Printing from the cups webserver has much the same effect. You tell the printer to print a test page, it powers up, as if it’s accepting a job, but prints nothing. Meanwhile again the log reports “completed successfully”. Save that nothing came out.

Printing mono still works perfectly. I’d say it was a printer error, except it works fine in Linux Mint with the same driver. I’m really confused.