KDE and CUPS . . . And system bloat
 

These are two unrelated questions but I didn't want to start two threads and waste the space on the board:


Background: KDE 3.5, Debian "mostly stable" with some unstable mixed in. Kernel 2.6.14. CUPS version 1.1.23-12 (not upgraded). This question is more out of curiosity than anything: On this particular system, to my surprise, my printer is detected automatically when I go to the KDE printers tab in the control center (I don't have the appropriate driver yet, but that's another issue). However, on another system which is basically the same except that it still has KDE 3.3, and fewer packages upgraded, In the control center when I try to switch it to CUPS it tells me it can not connect to the server. Weird. I'm not sure what's different.

Another thing I've been curious about for a while: how can system bloat be resolved? I currently have 988 packages installed, up from around 700 when I first installed. It seems as though when something is installed with all the dependencies, it can be removed later but the dependencies remain. I'm not a fan of re-installing at all, so I was wondering if there is some way to do a thorough clean-up of everything that is unneeded, if for no other reason than to reduce the number of packages installed so they are easier to browse. Any thoughts?

Few people seem to get this - congratulations!

On the one hand, unless you are hurting for hard drive space, having these floating around will not slog down your system. They will just take up space - and perhaps conflict with other libs contributing to "dependency hell" due to conflicting libs versions.

The only way to avoid this is to use a distro that does not check dependencies for you .....

Slackware !!!

Even then, unless you are keeping careful tabs on what gets installed, you will not know what to remove. At least with Slack, if you need to install a dependency, you installed it yourself so you know you did it.

Also, since slackware does not split the source into appliction and developement packages, this whole mess is less of an issue.

F

That seems like cups may not actually be running try http://localhost:631 and see if you get the CUPS Administration page if you do then setup the printer with this then try in the Control Center. You may want to try something like this ( dpkg -l | grep cups) on both machines just to make sure you have close to the same packages installed.

Sounds like a job for deborphan you may want to install then run it and you may want to look at using aptitude it automatically removes packages without dependencies.

I havent really used aptitude, does synaptic also remove the packages without dependencies?

Having got a clue there, I always use apt-get/dpkg for installing.

You're right, CUPS wasn't even running! So that's working now with a Epson Stylus Color 600 printer, although nothing prints unless I set it on "raw printer", and then, of course, it only prints text. I tried using "postscript printer" but it said that the postscript driver could not be found!

You have to install additional printer driver package, I have a HP desejet, and installed hpijs which has a specific driver for my printer model, don't know exactly about Epson though, maybe gimp-print?

Regarding dependency cleaning-up, debfoster is really a handy tool.

I had a 640 and it worked great according to your printers page at Linuxprinting it should as well. What do you have installed for CUPS packages use the command I posted above and could we see the output of lsmod | grep lp? You should see something like this.

And you may want to make sure that in your BIOS your setting for the printer port are set to just standard printer.

Yes, lsmod gives me output like that. But it still won't print. It seems odd because my printer is listed and it claims to print successfully, but nothing ever comes out. The printer does work in DOS and Windows (I actually haven't used it in Windows for a while, though, but it works fine in DOS).


~$ lsmod | grep lp
lp 11908 0
parport 37992 2 lp,parport_pc

Strange indeed then other than checking the BIOS settings and making sure you have the newest CUPS related packages installed I think I am out of ideas. What does it says in your dmesg about it you should see similar to these lines.

Yup, dmesg looks good. I tried EPP and SPP for my parallel port. Should I try ECP?

I don't know if I should download another driver, as has been suggested already, or if there's a problem with the cable or the printer itself. I'll try it in Windows again to see if it's still working there I guess.