I do not believe I am being original in observing that printing is one of the real shortcomings of Linux.
I am running RHEL 4 at work, and Ubuntu at home. Sometimes I go for weeks with no issues, and some days--nothing goes right.

A few common observations:

The print queue will often get hung up--with the printer shown as paused. On a good day "resume printer" gets everything going again. On a bad day, NOTHING will restart, and I have to remove and re-install all the print queues.

Under CUPS, many settings are inaccessible, and the cleaning and nozzle-check functions are missing.

There is always some level of mystery as to what printer is connected where. If they are detected, fine. But often, you wind up guessing: /dev/usb/lp0--no, lp1, no, lp2 Oh look, two different printers are on lp0--which one is right?

In RedHat, there is a marvelous thing called HAL, which likes to install print queues regardless if they are needed or not. HAL is toast the minute I figure out where his off switch is. (I wonder if the analog to 2001 was intentional??---evil programmers...)

I have solved some issues with Turboprint, but not all.

My limited knowledge of computer science--and my intuition--tells me it does not need to be this difficult.

Comments?

Thought provoking post. While I haven't seen any of your problems, I don't think my set up is as complicated as yours -- I'm happy to just access my girlfriend's HP942C in the next room. CUPS even show me the "Preview" function.

It's been a year & a month, give or take, how about an update?

Have you found any solutions?

Wow!!! unearthing old fossils.

Several things have happened since I posted this, including me getting smarter and Linux getting better.

There are still issues, but now I (mostly) know how to deal with them.

What still happens:
Sometimes, my systems will lose track of which printer is on which port. I have never found a consistent cause and effect pattern.
Sometimes a print queue will get hung up and I cannot fix it without simply deleting and re-installing
On RHEL, I often wind up with multiple queues for the same printer--something to do with HAL and UDEV.

Perhaps significant that there were no replies to this thread at the time?

I don't remember reading it at the time, & even if I had, I wouldn't have had any help, so I wouldn't have posted.