I have a really old HP DeskJet printer connected to my sister's debian testing system. I decided it was time to get it working for her. I installed ESP Ghostscript (debian package gs-esp), the foomatic stuff, and the pcl ppd file as in the instructions at linuxprinting. When I tried to print using cups I got a strange error.

"/usr/lib/libgnutls.so.7: no version information available (required by /usr/lib/libcups.so.2)"

Doing some googling I found that gnutls is broken in sarge. I set up a mixed system as in the apt-howto. This got rid of the strange error, but it did not solve my printing problems. When I tried to print out a test page I got page after page of random garbage. Grr...

After much frustration I found out that the pcl3 driver that they recommended was causing the problems. I used the cups web administration tool (http://localhost:631/admin) to select the "HP DeskJet series CUPS v1.1" as my model instead of the recommended "HP DeskJet Foomatic/pcl3". I then went into the configure printer section and put my output mode to grayscale. With these changes I am able to print text from this printer. Yay!