Hello Everyone,

I have ran into an interesting issue with my cheapo Deskjet F380. It's a neat little printer/scanner compo and I have been using it for a a couple of years just fine. I ran out of black ink, and thought I would save a little money and I bought a Tesco's branded replacement instead of an HP brand for about double the price. Since then, it will begin to print properly with black ink, but after a couple of lines it stops and starts printing in red ink. It does this with any Linux distro (I use Slackware, Ubuntu and Fedora.) This is a network printer attached to a machine running Ubuntu.

However, when printing over the network from a Windows machine, it prints normally in black ink.

Now, I don't think it is too difficult to figure that this is a driver issue. I have reinstalled hplip and hpjis drivers to no avail. I am, therefore, guessing that the problem is with the cheap replacement cartridge as far as Linux is concerned (drivers not compatible with it?) It just seem odd that the Windows driver can print normally.

Anyone have any thoughts about this issue? I have read other posts with the same issue, but no one has ever suggested a solution (except possibly forking out for the high priced HP branded replacement cartridges.)

Bob

In Ireland, you can get all those original cartridges refilled by places that specialize in it. So you buy it once, refill it 4-5 times, and then buy another new one. The other thing is to compile with all debug options set, or with a patch logging all decisions of the driver, and print off as you have the buggy hardware, & send the logs to the developer.

I did something similar for the ehci_hcd module which spat warnings all over my system. In fact I did no coding - I just moaned. One guy wrote the patch for logging, I annotated the logs, and sent them off to the developer. A patch went into kernel 2.6.29 for the ehci module
options ehci_hdc ignore_oc=1
will cut out all overcurrent warnings. Apparently via released chipsets with 2 dud usb ports. The problem was noticed; The 'fix' was to disable those ports completely. As it had 6 usb ports, that was ok really.