I have a Canon S400 printer. When printing from other OS-es its fast. However, when printing from Linux the printer gets very slow. It does not make any noticable difference when changing settings to lover resolution and such. Does anyone know what the problem might be? I run Linux Mandrake 10.1 Community.

How do you have your printer setup? Are you using cups? Is it a postfix printer? Are you printing over the networking?

I am not printing over a network. And yes, I am using cups. For some strange reason, I wrote ALSA in the title, which is wrong .
What does postfix mean?

postfix means I'm doing too much at once... I ment to say it is a postscript printer (aka ps).

Do you know what cups driver your using for it?


I was wondering what sound had to do with printing

I have version 1.1.21-0.rc1.5mdk of CUPS.
How do I know if its a postscript-printer?

I am seeing a bunch of different cups drivers for that printer. You might want to try using a different one then what you are using and see if it works better.

Availible drivers I found with a quick look:
CUPS+Gimp-Print v4.2.7
Foomatic/bjc600
Foomatic/bjc6000a1.upp
Foomatic/s400a1.upp

The Foomatic Website is a good place to look for information on using those drivers.

Gimp-Print has very high quality drivers and supposively supports that printer as well.

BTW.. It doesn't appear to be a postscript printer, so don't worry about that.

Also, if you go to localhost:631 with your web browser and click on printers you can find out what driver your using.

For example, on my printer in my office it reports "HP DeskJet 720C Foomatic/pnm2ppa (recommended)".

You can tell from that I'm using the Foomatic/pnm2ppa driver.

Cups is the unix standard for printing so I'm guessing it is just setup to use a driver that isn't the best option for your printer. According to my cups the Foomatic/s400a1.upp driver is the "recommended" driver. I'd probably give that a shot, and if that doesn't work I'd try the Gimp-Print driver.