HP Laserjet 4 Display Messages with CUPS

anhume · 02-29-2008, 05:06 PM

Kind Folks - I have a LAN with Windows and Linux (Fedora 6) machines and an old HP Laserjet 4P (HP4) and Linksys printserver; the HP4 has a Postscript SIMM installed. Normally, with Windows jobs, the HP4 display shows "Powersave", "Warming up", or "Ready". When I run a test page with one (SONY) of the Linux machines, the display does to show "XX Guest Test Page" (where XX is the job number) and then it remains that way. It does not revert to "Powersave" "Warming up", or "Ready", regardless of subsequent Windows or Linux jobs. According to the test page itself, the SONY job uses CUPS v1.2.x with Postscript Level 2 Version 2013.111(1) Product: HP Laserjet 4 Plus Serial #: 138249 (as indicated under Interpreter Information) as contained in the HP4. However, if the HP4 is switched off and then on again (with its power switch), it returns to the normal display messages. This is a repeatable behaviour and seems to indicate that CUPS (or something else) is failing to reset the display after each job. There's more: The other Linux machine (OCTO) does not change the display messages to "Guest Test Page", either when it runs test page jobs or normal (OpenOffice) jobs. According to the OCTO test page, it uses CUPS v1.2.x with Postscript Level 3 Version 3010(81504); Product ESP Ghostscript Serial #:42 (as indicated under Interpreter Information). It goes to "Warming up" normally, but it it does not reset the display to "Ready" after the job is done. With both th SONY and the OCTO machines, I set up the HP4 as an LPD and specified the (fixed) printserver IP address. I hope a CUPS expert finds this interesting.

comprookie2000 · 02-29-2008, 05:26 PM

I have a Laserjet 4L, here is how I have mine set up and it works fine.

Code:

Description: HP Laserjet
Location: Desk1
Make and Model: HP LaserJet 4L Foomatic/hpijs
Printer State: idle, accepting jobs, published.
Device URI: socket://192.168.0.10:9100

I am using a dlink print server.

I got that info from http://localhost:631/printers/

anhume · 03-05-2008, 11:18 AM

The issue is the HP4 display messages. The network printing itself is OK but CUPS seems to have taken over the HP4 panel display and is is not reset when the print job finishes. Sometimes the messages have varied eg: "anhume utilities" instead of the normal "powersave" when the HP4 is idle. The HP4 resets if you power switch it off and on.