Help! CUPS in Kubuntu is driving me crazy

[Ian Rose]

D. R. Evans wrote:
> Here's the setup:
>
> Brother HL-1040 printer physically connected to a Mdv 2006 system running CUPS.
>
> The printer is visible and works fine from:
>
> 1. The system to which it is attached
> 2. Windows systems on the network
> 3. An old Mandrake 9.2 system
> 4. A new 64-bit Mdv 2006 system (actually, the same system on which
> I;m running Kubuntu, but booted into a different OS)
>
> I have just spent three hours trying to get Kubuntu to do something
> sensible, and am totally failing :-(
>
> I'm still trying to get my head around the fact that Kubuntu won't let
> me log in as root and get administrative tasks done easily, but I
> don't think that this is the cause of these problems.
>
> So I found a "printers" menu item in K | Settings | Printers.
>
> 1. Add Printer
> 2. Click "Remote CUPS Server"
> 3. Leave on "anonymous"
> 4. Host: 192.168.0.1
>   This finds the printer (BROTHEHL1040) OK...
>
> 5. I seem to need to find a driver at this point (not sure why; the
> Mdv 2006 system seemed to find the printer and install everything
> automatically); the other systema are all old systems that I don't
> recall the details of any more).
> 6. Select BROTHER hl7x0 (which is the driver on the machine to which
> the printer is attached, and also the driver on the 64-but Mdv system)
> 7. Print "Test" -- I'm not sure what is supposed to print, but what
> actually prints is a single sheet that says:
>
> -12345X at PJL
> @PJL ENTER LANGUAGE = HBP
> @L at G
>
> The fact that _something_ prints indicates that I must be close, but I
> have not been able to get past this point :-(
>
> This is a showstopper for me; if I can't get the printer working
> properly, I'll have to go back to Mdv -- after having decided that I
> was switching because so many other things didn't work in Mdv, but do
> work in Kubuntu; but none of those things is as fundamental as
> printing.
>
>   
As far as I can tell Dapper client > Dapper CUPS server printing doesn't 
work out of the box. I have been struggling to get this to work for some 
time now, experimenting with different clients in a VM AND different 
servers in a VM. Network printing works as it should for every 
combination I tried (SUSE > Dapper, Dapper > Mepis etc etc) but not 
Dapper > Dapper. That's the bad news - but I have now managed to get it 
to work as it should. However this is the result of a lot of tinkering, 
and it is likely that some of my method is unnecessary!

1. First of all I forced the kprinter client to use the remote server:
It looks like Kubuntu Dapper is hardwired to print to localhost:631 and 
the only way I found to get it to use the remote server was to manually 
hack the 
/usr/share/kubuntu-default-settings/kde-profile/default/share/config/kdeprintrc 
file and alter the
"Host = localhost"
line to read
"Host = tux" (replace "tux" with your CUPS server name or ip)
After restarting the client CUPS, you should be able to get the remote 
printer installed properly through the System Settings GUI.

2. Now that kprinter apps were printing successfully, I found that 
non-kprinter apps (OpenOffice, Firefox) would successfully print only

"-12345X at PJL ENTER-LANGUAGE=PCL3GUI
BLAH BLAH
BLAH BLAH"

whenever I tried to print over the network. I was completely stuck at 
this stage for several weeks until this morning, when I discovered that 
by creating a
/etc/cups/client.conf
file consisting of a single line:
ServerName tux (or the ip of the remote CUPS server)
I could then restart the local CUPS and print perfectly, over the 
network, from both kprinter AND non-printer apps!

After a brief period during Hoary and Breezy when printing "just 
worked", I really haven't appreciated being reminded just how awful 
fixing CUPS is. As this affects both Kubuntu AND Ubuntu LTS I would 
imagine at some point a fix would be rolled out via updates, and having 
seen just how many people have had these problems on ubuntuforums and 
elsewhere, I look forward to Edgy, which I can't imagine being shipped 
with such a challenging printing setup.

-- 
Ian Rose