I am scared of using my printer. I made a similar thread a month ago, but no one was able to help me, so I will try to go into as much detail as I can.
The first time I tried to print using Linux, nothing happened. So I checked the control centre printer status bar and the print job did not appear. The when I logged out it started to print. I am guessing that I must have been running too many programs at ounce. This problem occured while printing a Gimp format picture. However when closing programs, I managed to get it to print and it had worked ever since.
A few weeks ago I tried to print a Webpage and got an error. Then the printer printed jiberish. I switched it off to save ink and paper. Then when I restart the system and the printer, it starts printing jiberish the moment I get to the login screen. I decided to just let it print till it stopped.
Then I try printing a ms word document by Open Office. The same result. Somebody recommened that I download gimp-print. I did that and as far as I know installed it. Tried again and same result. I remember AWR being mentioned but not sure if that is just for gimp.
My printer is an Epson Stylus C60 and my distro is Mandrake 9.1. I have used up almost half of my black ink cartridge, and in England they are not cheap.

A company i used to do work for used Epson printers.. C60's C80's etc... They were notorious for all of a sudden randomly printing junk. I do not know the answer to your question.. but I woul like to add that this is one of the nuicences I have about linux. printing is diffrent in every single application...

btw... Epson ink cartridges in the US aren't cheap either... I spend $60+usd's on for ink cartidges for an C80..

how did you set the printer up? are you using cups? have a look here

http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_pr...son-Stylus_C60

that should shed some light on the setup.
good luck.

It is a local printer connected on a serial connection. I don't know if this helps but, when I go to control centre peripherals, the printer appears to be configured correctly, but after going into admin mode, it has CUPS as the setting. I may be wrong but I thought that cups was for network printers. Could this be the problem? What protocal should I use for a local printer?

cups can be configured for local or network printers. try from a browser to connect to

http://localhost:631/admin

from there you can configure the printer via web interface. as for the garbled output, if the printer is misconfigured, and you send a print job, you'll probably get a garbled output.

I am trying the link you have given me. It reads my printer ok, but when I click on configure printer or print test, the browser just tells me
transfering data from local host
for a few min. As the site told me that I am using Gimp-Print, I think it may be worth trying to print something.

just got this error from the site.

Error:

server-error-service-unavailable

Got the error below when trying to print.

A print error occured Error message from system

error while reading filter description for true Emprty command line recieved

sounds like the cups daemon is not running. the "site" is actually an interface to your machine "localhost". just wanted to clear that up. from mandrake you can have a look at the control center for services, make sure that cups starts on boot, then you can give a go at configuring it.

... and to follow up on that, to start cups if it isn't running, log in as root on a console, and run: