Cups error - Epson Photo printer
 

Trying to get an Epson R220 to be a network printer connected to a SuSE9.0 box. SuSE9.0 doesn't provide drivers so I've added Turbo Print and local printing works fine. I can also get the R220 to work off print drivers built for other Photo printers. The printer is visible on a network (using Samba) and is called Epson220. A Windows XP box can see the printer (and other directories on the SuSE9.0 box), and I have installed the R220 driver. When I do a test print from Windows, nothing happens - no jobs in queues. The error_log file in /var/log/cups gives the following:

E [12/Mar/2006:13:32:23 +0000] print_job: Unsupported format 'application/octet-stream'!
I [12/Mar/2006:13:32:23 +0000] Hint: Do you have the raw file printing rules enabled?

I've checked that network printing does work using non Turbo Print ppds - a HP1320 printer works fine. I doubt whether Turbo Print is the issue. Looks to me like the Epson driver on Windows is sending a format that Cups can't recognise. I also used an Epson stylus color 440 successfully, until the printer became too old (the R220 is the replacement). So it appears that for me this is a problem with networking all new Epson printers through Linux. Can anyone help?

Make sure you have it setup for shared printing. cups is closed to the outside world by default. Your distro may have a GUI printer setup screen that allows you to click on something. Or edit (RH) /etc/cups/cupsd.conf to look something like.

Restart cups. And make sure the firewall is open. You can also search the forum for more examples.

edit: after rereading your post, this may not be the solution, but check into it.

Thanks for all for your help. There seems to be a problem with new Epson PHOTO printers driving Cups. Older Epson printers are OK; I don't know about their general purpose printers. My solution was to load the Adobe generic postscript driver on the Windows machines, with the ADIST5.PPD file (the generic one is of little use) - all from the Adobe site. Cups happily converts the postscript to drive the printer. I used Turbo Print to drive the printer. Turbo Print supports lots of recent printers, and is OK for general printing. I paid the licence fee (a little expensive) to avoid the advertising on anything other than basic printing. The only important things this set up doesn't do is show the ink levels (Turbo Print uni-directional interface) and borderless photo prints (paper handling on the feeding edge isn't correct, I don't think it is a printer problem).

My thought is that Epson could have done a better job.