very basic PRINTING & TERMINAL help
 

Hello!

I'm a VERY non-technical office-user of FEDORA Core Linux

Now I'm having a printing problem.

There have been some works waiting to be printed for hours. I tried to kill these works, but could not find any print manager or alike in my System tools. Only a printer configuration tool or something, which however does not allow me to manage print jobs, only queues.

I got some advise to write lprm-command in command terminal. However, when I try to open the command terminal it only appears for 1 second and then disappears.

Thanks in advance for your help!

-tuomo-

please provide more info.

For eg:
- desktop environment (gnome / kde / just a wm)
- what do you use to send the jobs to the printer
- how do you know theyre still in queue?
- What terminal are you trying to start?
- does your .bashrc / .bash_profile have any usermade mods that could cause a direct exit?
- can you log in from a normal TTY?

Press CTRL+ALT+F6
Login as root
Use lpq to list the jobs and lprm <job_number> to kill jobs.

Hi

As I said, I'm a non-technical guy testing wheter Linux is feasible for normal office-work, but I try to answer:

- desktop environment (gnome / kde / just a wm)
Gnome, I guess
- what do you use to send the jobs to the printer
I just set the default printer settings that Fedora Core required, they worked finely until these recent problems
- how do you know theyre still in queue?
I check from system settings->printing
- What terminal are you trying to start?
I was given an advise to give commands on: system tools->terminal (I don't know more)
- does your .bashrc / .bash_profile have any usermade mods that could cause a direct exit?
No idea
- can you log in from a normal TTY?
what is TTY (Not abbreviation for Tampere University of Technology, I guess...)?

TTY is the text terminal. By normal tty he means the console you get if you don't log into X Windows (or what happens if you follow my instructions in my last post)

tuomo: Here are some questions and comments:

1) Are you using Fedora Core 1 (FC1), FC2 or FC3? When you are booting, a screen appears that says “Fedora Core X“, where No X = FC1 and X = 2 or 3 are for FC2 and FC3, respectively.

2) Before doing anything else, pretend its windows and try rebooting the system.

3) Is there a printer icon in the upper or lower bar (depending on your configuration)? If yes, open it and tell me whether you see a list of print jobs and what the typical message is associated with the jobs (such as “completed”).

4) Open the printer configuration tool (RedHat > System Settings > Printing) and see if any printers are listed under “Queue Name”.

5) Assuming some printers are present, are any checked as the “Default” printer? If No, highlight one and select the “default” button.

6) Assuming some printer are present, are you trying to print to a network printer or to a local printer (i.e., one that is plugged into you computer)?

7) Assuming some printers are present, are there any error messages under “Description” and what are they?

hehe.. ive allways laughed at the TTY vesus Tampere Tech. Uni conflict.. Will hopefully be studying there soon.. (;

Im not that familiar with gnome, but i suppose there is some way to run a single command (for eg. alt+F2) or something in the menus.. If you find one, try running a terminal app called xterm (just wrtie xterm as the command).. It should work as well as the default gnome terminal.. You also might find xterm from the menus of gnome..

But as said before, using the tty by pressing alt+ctrl+F2 - F6 will give you a text console also.. When you want to get back to X (the graphical UI) press alt+ctrl+F7

TNX folks!!!
 

Thanks SO much. I could (amazingly) open the bloody TTY, followed your instructions, killed the unnecessary printing works.

OK, I needed to boot the machine once as I only afterwards got this CTRL+ALT+F7 hint!

But now it works perefectly (until the next problem, I guess...)

Thanks so much!

-tuomo-

WhatsHisName's questions
 

[

1) FC3

3) Is there a printer icon in the upper or lower bar (depending on your configuration)?
NO, there is not such an icon, but that would be usefull!

4) Open the printer configuration tool (RedHat > System Settings > Printing) and see if any printers are listed under “Queue Name”.

yes, there is one HP3200 Network printer

5) Assuming some printers are present, are any checked as the “Default” printer? If No, highlight one and select the “default” button.

yes, one is selected

6) Assuming some printer are present, are you trying to print to a network printer or to a local printer (i.e., one that is plugged into you computer)?

network

7) Assuming some printers are present, are there any error messages under “Description” and what are they? [/B][/QUOTE]

now after your and others' wise hints the disappeared, but there was something like "printer waiting for ..." or something not really an error message but indicating that the printer was busy

Do I understand correctly that you are now able to print? I will assume that you can now print.

Regarding tty, FCx allows you to open a terminal window without leaving the GUI. It is reachable through RedHat > System Tools > Terminal or just right click anywhere and select “terminal”.

3) The printer icon automatically appears if you print something. It tells you the status of print jobs and allows you to cancel print jobs, much like the windows print manager. Often, it will not cancel a print job that is being held up by a networking issue.

6) FC3 has an odd network printer firewall problem at port 515. It is often helpful for diagnostic purposes to turn off the firewall (i.e., stop the iptables service (RedHat > System Tools > Server Settings > Services) and see if the print job goes through when you are having a network printer problem.

7) Yes, the “Waiting for ...” is a typical error message. After printing, it usually says something like “spool complete..”.

WhatsHisName's questions...
 

1 yes, now it works finely

2 I can - for instance by right-clicking - find the terminal, but when I try to open it, it appears only for a second to the screen, and then disappears. However, this TTY (ctrl+alt+f6) way works very well

3 No, no printer icon appears anywhere as I print

4 Ok, my network printer port is 9100 if that is of any help or even at all related to the isue, you raised

By the way, I'm very happy of the way you folks are helping a non-tech novice!

-tuomo-

Before I forget, I want to make a comment about using any linux distribution in an office environment. Beyond the obvious things like learning a new OS, your biggest issue will probably be your need to exchange documents with other groups that are not linux based.

Even with simple text documents, translating between any two word processing packages is usually problematic. For example, Word and WordPerfect cannot exchange documents with 100% formatting fidelity, no matter what the vendors say. Yeah, the text makes the transition, but you always need to clean up the formatting, no matter which direction you do the conversion. Exchanging between Excel and QuattroPro has the same problem.

Also, it can be hard to find substitutes for things like accounting packages and project management software like micro$oft Project, so anticipate retaining some/a lot of windows capability.
..........

Now, back to the technical stuff. The nonworking gnome-terminal is very odd. Things like that often go away when you reinstall FC and, when you are new at this, it is often easier to just reinstall FC3 than it is to fix a problem. After all, you really only get to know Fedora once you have reinstalled it 5 or 6 times.

If you want to try something different with the terminal, you could try manually adding it as a launcher and seeing if the problem remains. Here is how you do that:

-Log in as root.
-Point to clear region on the upper desktop bar (or lower bar, if that is all you have), right click and select “Add Panel”.
-From the list, select “Custom Application Launcher” and press the “+Add” button.
-Enter the Name: as “Terminal” and the Command: as “gnome-terminal” (without the quote marks) and press the “OK” button.

In the bar, you should now see a monitor icon that will launch the terminal.

Did you notice “Weather Report” while you were looking through the “add launcher” list?