I had a similar printing problem on an HP Deskjet 855C. Configuring the printer in cups directly and forcing the print mode to a specific print mode all the time, vice letting the app control it, helped.

Open your browser to localhost:631. Remove your printer and re-add in cups. Once added, configure the printer from cups and select a specific print mode, e.g. 300dpi, draft grayscale. Try the different modes supported on your printer and you may fine one that works. The cups admin console is the only place I was able to find to control this particular printer setting.

Note also that I never got it to print at all with a parallel cable and this solution only worked when I switched to a USB cable.

I had similar printing problems with 3 different HP printers, either not printing reliably or not printing at all. This is on several different PCs, 3 different printers: HP 4L, Deskjet 855c, Deskjet 722c, using both USB and parallel.

The solution above and several other solutions on this forum have not worked for me. I have been experimenting with other distros and found Mepis to work flawlessly. I had hoped Ubuntu 6.06 would improve over 5.10 but this did not happen.

In frustration I closely compared Mepis to Ubuntu and found several differences, mostly in terms of the config files used by cups. To make a long story short, the silver bullet is literally to blow away the Ubuntu /etc/cups directory and replace it with the contents of the Mepis /etc/cups directory. Ubuntu now prints like a charm because cups is being properly initialized. Bottom line: Ubuntu's cups config files are junk.

Specific steps required are:

1. As described in /usr/share/doc/cupsys/README.Debian file, you need to add the user 'cupsys' to the group 'shadow' using this command: sudo adduser cupsys shadow.

2. If you have not already done so, you need to create a full root account using this command: sudo passwd root. When prompted, enter your current password (the first user account created on the machine), then the new password for the root account.

3. Get yourself a copy of Mepis. A free download. Boot it up, As root, tar up Mepis /etc/cups directory including all subdirectories, and preserving all paths. Email the gz file yourself to get them off the Mepis box and into cyberspace, On Ubuntu, retrieve the email with the tar.gz file and save the file to the Ubuntu machine. As root, extract the files from the tar and extract to the Ubuntu /etc/cups directory, overwriting all the contents.

4. Re-boot your machine to restart everything, or simply restart cups itself: 'sudo /etc/init.d/cupsys stop', and then 'sudo /etc/init.d/cupsys start'

You can now open the CUPS web admin interface (http://localhost:631), add a printer, authenticate as root using your root password when prompted by CUPS, and install the printer.

Basically all I did here was set up required permissions that cups has disabled by default (and that are documented in the readme cited above), and change out the cups config files (there are several, not just cupsd.conf) used in Ubuntu for the cups config files used in Mepis, and everything works. FINALLY !! after only 4 months of putzing around.

Hi all...
I have a HP Photosmart C1380
I tried it with the hpijs drivers, but it didnt worked...I didnt try the hplip drivers...because you wrote that I shouldn use those...
Ok than I tried the hplip drivers..and it works :) :) :)
And the hpoj works good for the scanning too :)

Only the hint...if it doesnt work that you can try it with the hplip drivers... :)
But thx anyway... :)

Resolve Problem using usb to parallel cable
 

Same message "Printer not connected; will retry in 30 seconds..."

I use an NSLU2 device with CUPS and a Deskjet-720C printer as printing system at my house and now i can print, poor quality, but i can print!!!

Yesterdeay when i followed up a how to i put in my printers conf this line,

DeviceURI usb:/dev/lp0

I changed it to

DeviceURI parallel:/dev/lp0

and voila! it runs perfectly

Now in Spanish

Hola chavales!

El CUPS me ponia un mensajito :

"Printer not connected; will retry in 30 seconds..."

Cambié una linea que copié de un How to


DeviceURI usb:/dev/lp0

por

DeviceURI parallel:/dev/lp0

y voila! Funciona perfectamente!!!

Hasta otra

When will we dump CUPS?
 

Here it is now nearly 5 years later, and CUPS is still a major embarrasment to the Linux community. I can't believe it.

and I can't believe that a printer which worked just fine for years is now suddenly and inexplicably and irreparably "open device failed; will retry in 30 seconds..." :(