I have had RedHat 7.2 and 7.3 for almost 8 weeks and still have not been able to get a single document, textfile, corel drawing, internet page, anything to pringt from my lexmark optra color 45. Somehow I don't think it is a specific lexmark problem as much as getting a single driver installed and working.

RedHat says printconf keeps bombing (segmentation fault) due to a bug with 7.2 and so I should try 7.3. I tried it and it's still a no go. I've installed cups, kcups, paid for easy proprint cups, downloaded LPRng, used kde's printmanager, I don't even know what's the dominant printing system anymore. I've printed (at work) 100's of pages of documents and howto's, written to RedHat, written to Easy Pro, and google searched until the wee hours of the morning (even on a work day), all to no avail.

I'm just about at my wits end. Last resort . . . cash. I'm willing to pay for advice that gets me printing. I need CorelDraw to print. I'd like WordPerfect to work but I'll settle for StarOffice for now. I've got to be able to print from Netscape. Give me a reasonable price. At this point I'm just looking for results. I knew Linux would require some work and I'm not adverse to searching for answers. But I've re-installed the operating system so many times now that I'm afraid at this point to add any other programs to the system for fear I'll only be going through this thing incessantly.

That's my tale of woe. You tell me what information about my system you need, tell me what I need to do, get me operational, give me a price, and we can do business. Thanks in advance.

Jonathan Smalls

You can try http://www.turboprint.de They have a nice program for printing. If your printer is not supported you can use it to troubleshoot the installation - will tell you at setup what it is looking for and what is missing.

Going by the info on this page your printer should work perfectly, maybe the printer itself is faulty?

did you try apsfilter? I never had problems with that and my EPSON printer.
Hope that helps
-NSKL

My printer was not supported in turboprint but it probably will be down the road. Aussie, the site was very helpful. I can set my printer driver as generic postscript. And with that help and the download of APSfilter (thanks NSKL) my long wait is over. I'M A PRINTING FOOL!

I have to buy you people dinner or something.

Good to see you got it working
If I'm ever in NY you I'll take you up on that dinner

Way to go - maybe i get my printer to work one day,too!

Hi all and I hope this is not too long-winded.

Attention Aussie (you sounded like a very confident Linux expert-user) and all determined users.

I am the determined migrant to Linux, day 23 (400+ hours working on Linux) and going strong...

Linux migration chronology.

1. Installed ELX pre-GOLD 1.0 - too new to appreciate anything.

2. Installed SuSE 8.0 live-evaluation - didn't feel I was getting enough.

3. Downloaded all of SuSE 8.0 packages (SuSE 8.0 ISO not available for downloading yet) but failed to installed from HDD as the moment to install came, YaST 2 couldn't mount my FAT32 partition where the packages were stored. Tried 4 times.

4. Mandrake 8.2 - still didn't feel right after learning quite a bit from configuring different hardware and plugins. Printing was enabled by the setup of Mandrake though, but not good enough.
A few re-installations of this one as well.

5. Redhat 7.3. Excellent but couldn't print. Mucked around for a while. Re-installed twice and something wiped out one of my Windows XP NTFS partition. Had backup and put everything else back in place again.

6. Slackware 8.1 - sounded more for me (I can't explain). Hit at it for the longest since, and learning more each day while banging at things the hard way.

Thanks for being patient so far.

Now the printing problem (haven't got my scanner to work yet).

1. Slackware 8.1 came with Ghostscript 7.05 and Gimp-print 4.2.0.

2. The whole setup did not ask me to install the printer, through the compilation stages of the kernel (that was the longest process since I met Linux). Did that 3 times though. Those were good. I like the lessons there.

2. Managed to put everything in place after failing to "startx" the first time due to my Nvidia video card needing a driver for Linux. Done that on a new installation of 8.1 on another partition. OK.

3. Conifgured X-window and a few other things and played around with KDE 3.0.1. (Not without many hiccups though.)

4. PRINTING!!! No setup acces from the GUI. Studied ways to do it from terminal-mode.

5. My printer, Canon S400Sp (parallel port). Apsfilter couldn't allow me to select the STP driver for Canon S400. None of the STP drivers was selectable, for that matter.

6. Tried some other Canon drivers (trial and error) and got a couple of them to print. Apsfilter "print test-page" worked fine.

7. Tried to print something from Kwrite and Kword. Error: "Connection refused...make sure the remote host supports the lpd protocol...cannot open connection to 'localhost'.."

8. Found the Printing Cookbook and followed the diagnostic instructions there and got "checkpc -f" and "lpd", etc to enable printing, but the printout was not true to page, etc.

9. Downloaded Ghostscript 7.05 again and Gimp-printing 4.3.3 (new). Installed them both.

10. This time, I was able to select STP drivers from apsfilter SETUP. Took the opportunity to install a few STP drivers, Canon S400, BJC3000 & BJC6000 plus a couple of non-STP drivers.

11. No print test-page allowed from apsfilter this time, citing that /tmp/apsfilter1282/test_page.aps not found.

12. I was also able to use GUI printer setup from within Kcontrol Centre.

13. Went on to print as per s/no 7 above. Same error message.

14. Did as per s/n 8 above but nothing happened apparently. The prints were issued and the task bar flickered. Then it seemed like the print jobs just went into twilight zone or something...No error messages nor any complaint?!?


I have spent many hours searching the web for problems relating to LPD, LPR, etc and ghostscripts, gimp-print, STP, etc, etc.

Nothing.

Perhaps I haven't found the right places.

CAN YOU GUYS HELP?

Thanks in advance.