Inherited an old Laserjet 6P that was working fine XP. No matter which printer driver I use all I get are pages and pages of garbage during the test print. I have tried the hplip, gimp, ljet4 drivers without success. I have tried sending text files from the command line as well (cat /etc/passwd > /dev/lp0) with the same result.

Fedora 11 64
cups 1.4
hplip-3.9
hpijs-3.9

Anyone using this printer with cups 1.4? Any ideas which driver to use?

I haven't used a 6P, but I have a Laserjet 2300DN with an internal network card and the latest driver from hpcups works fine. hplip-hpcups has replaced hplip-hjis. It seems to have all the same features as the Windows driver in a simpler control panel. The only time I have used the LaserJet PCL6 driver was with a Canon network printer that did PCL emulation. That now has a Canon driver as they now support Linux, though I suspect this is because their current range of office printers run an embedded Unix/Linux, as I discovered when I set it up over the network using the web interface!

Can you get the 6P to print a configuration page so you can see what the internal settings are? You can get the user manual off the HP website. Also try using a PostScript driver instead. I think the two versions of the driver names end with "..pcl" and "..ps" respectively.

One other thing to check is whether the 6P is trying to use internal fonts. This is a problem with the PCL version of the driver and can cause the symptoms you describe, but since the PostScript driver sends the page as an image, fonts are not an issue.

I suggest you check the printers internal config first, then try a PostScript driver, and let us know how you get on.

You did "cat /etc/passwd > /dev/lp0" and you got garbage?

Can you describe or show what the garbage looked like?

I ended up using hp-laserjet_6mp-pcl3.ppd by default cups 1.4 seems to install postcript drivers (hp-laserjet_6p-ps.ppd)

After a successful test page I can also cat /etc/passwd > /dev/lp0 (without Carriage returns of course). Its possible the buffer cause this to print squares diamonds and spades and other garbage.


Thanks to sadiqdm!

Sounds to me like the printer has been set to default to postscript. That would explain "garbage" when sending directly to /dev/lp0.