Hi there. I just recently installed a usb printer on my kubuntu 7.10 laptop. I bought new print cartridges and performed the test featured when finishing the printer's installation. It's a Epson Stylus C63 and the wizard to install the printer had no problem installing the driver whatsoever. The problem is that when going into kate or OpenOffice, and i want to print a single or several pages, the printer acts as if it was printing something, but it doesn't print anything; or at least something that makes sense.

I noticed that when printing a few lines, the printer just draws a gray line at the top and bottom of the page. That means that probably it's receiving the command to print, but it's either sent the wrong command or it's interpreting it wrong.

I followed these steps to try another way of setting up the printer.
1. Install the lsb package.
2. Install cups, foomatic-filters ESO Ghostscript or GPL Ghostscript, fhs-printingdirs
3. alien --script <rpm package>
4. dpkg -i <package.deb>
5. Setup print queue.
The same thing is still happening. The same gray lines above and below.

I appreciate your help in advance, and as always, thanks a bunch!!!

Have you tried doing a test print directly from the printer using the printer buttons?

Will try that immediately.

Ok, i tried to print using the buttons, but no option is there to print from there. Fortunately, the printer setup comes with the option to test the printer, so i did it. The end result is a figure with 8 sides, each has like a slice of different colors (so we know the colors and cartridges work); and then it draws a couple of gray L-shaped figures, and that's about it. No sentences that make any sense whatsoever. Or at least numbers or anything. We can say this test does not look good.

Quick question here.

How do i find out, through configuration files, what driver is installed for the printer? I want to find out so that i can try several drivers until i install the one that works.

Thanks a lot.

Here's info on doing a nozzle check directly from the printer: http://self-help.epson.net/start

I will attempt the following steps from this link:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...TODAY.m238.lVI

This is supposedly the way i get my Epson Stylus C63 printer driver installed. Let me see how true is this.

I'll post back with the results.

Check this up. After installing the driver, i tried printing. I got two gray lines. One on top, that has the name of the kate file in white; the gray line on the bottom, that has the full path of the location where that file is. Now, while printing the text, i noticed that it is actually trying to print accordingly to what i have on kate, but it turns out to be 'blank' printing.

Let me know if i make myself clear as to what's going on with my printer.

Did the nozzle check complete without errors? What does the CUPS admin page tell you about your printer?

This is what i get inside the printers tab inside the cups web based administration page:

StylusC63 "Printer is now on-line."
Description: EPSON Stylus C63
Location:
Printer Driver: Epson Stylus C63 Foomatic/gutenprint-ijs-simplified.5.0
Printer State: processing, accepting jobs, published.
Device URI: usb://EPSON/Stylus%20C63

Regarding the test page from cups admin page, i just get a pizza like figure with several colors and below, two L shaped figures in gray. Not a very convincing test page i would say. Nothing that makes sense.

The only real difference between your printer driver and mine is this: Epson Stylus Color 460 - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.0.1. Are you saying your cups test page looks different from this one (scroll down to the bottom of the page): http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/overview.html

That's right!!!!! I just get the pizza-shaped color slices and the shadow borders of the squares at the middle of the test page.

Weird, have you tried changing the cups driver?

I'll research to find out how to do that. I'll post back with the results.

Hi there!!!

I GOT THE MEGA UPDATE FOR THIS ISSUE!!! HOLD ON TO YOU HORSES.

After the third time trying to print the test page from the CUPS web thing, i figured that the colors were working, cause the pizza-shaped color slices appeared just fine. So i decided to create an open-office writer document in read. GUESS WHAT: the print out was perfect in RED.

After that, i attempted one in yellow, just for the hell of it, and of course, it printed out just fine. So bottom line is, the black cartridge or the driver, either one or both, are not handling black colored print outs. Perhaps even the head for the black cartridge ink is clogged up or burned out. Who knows, it maybe that the ink cartridge is damaged.

Please come back to me as soon you can. Thanks too much.

LQ and you guys really rock!!!! Too much knowledge flying around.