[Known upstream bug] LMDE UP4: Printer properties error

[Bergschreck]

These various printing bugs (Kyocera Postscript, Brother Postscript, IPP tag and so on) are a good example for what they wrote in the LMDE FAQ:

Although it's using Romeo for unstable packages, LMDE continuously changes as it receives updates and new software. Compared to a frozen version of Linux Mint which changes very little once it's publicly released, it's not as stable. Things are likely to break more often but fixes can also come quicker. For this reason, LMDE requires a deeper knowledge and experience with Linux, dpkg and APT.

There was a major redesign of the printing workflow at the end of last year, which broke a lot of things. Some of these redesigned packages reached debian testing causing all this trouble to LMDE users. In contrary Ubuntu: with their fixed release cycle they grab all the packages from Debian unstable and fix all the bugs themselve before they release it. Neither Ubuntu Oneiric nor Ubuntu Precise suffered from these printing bugs because of Ubuntus good quality control.

This convinced me of keeping Ubuntu (Xubuntu), switching only the desktop to Xfce (since I don't like Unity or Gnome 3 shell).

[Matt267]

Bergschreck,

I'm at the same crossroad as you. I tried Xubuntu on my netbook last year, but LMDE gave me better battery life. I might just buy a bigger battery

Matt

[GTBecker]

> ... I just installed cups-filters from Debian unstable...

What changes did you make to /etc/apt/sources.list that got you the 1.0.5-1 cups-filters package, rootchick. Everything I've tried gives me the current latest, not unstable or sid. Did you then just do a sudo apt-get install cups-filters ?

Tom

[rootchick]

Sorry for not clarifying...I downloaded the unstable version (1.0.16-2+b1) from http://packages.debian.org and installed it with dpkg -i. All the dependencies were already met, I had no issues installing it.

[GTBecker]

Thanks.

I was able to install the cups package by replacing the repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list with

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deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian sid main 

, refreshing in the Update Manager, deselecting all but cups. It installed fine and I was left in the same condition as you - I can print on an HP 2015DN but still see the repeated properties error. A Canon MX882, however, still does not print.

Tom

[Allin Gaijin]

I tried rootchick's workaround for my Brother MFC 7840W. I still get blank pages.

This is a distro killer for me.

[Bergschreck]

I'm at the same crossroad as you. I tried Xubuntu on my netbook last year, but LMDE gave me better battery life.

Matt, you are right. I compared both, and Xubuntu has a higher battery drain. I think this is because Xubuntu is not as lightweight as it could be. Under the hood there are many similarities with Ubuntu. I saw Zeitgeist running, which is normally only needed for Unity. Those background processes costs a lot of cpu power and battery consumption. I don't need/want Zeitgeist, so I removed it. When I wanted to install gedit, the package has many dependices to Gnome/Unity stuff and to Zeitgeist. It wanted to install dozen of packages, so I decided to NOT install it.

It's not only the battery drain. Since switching from Ubuntu Natty to Xubuntu Precise, I see that the fan of my notebook is running most of the time, even when system is idle.

This is ok if I have a brand new system (Core i7) and want lots of gimmicks. But it is not ok if I decide to install a lightweight system (like Xubuntu) and don't want to waste resources for lots of gimmicks I don't need.

I don't want such a bloated system, so I decided to stay with LMDE.

[CapitalG]

i have a hp desktop 4480 and getting blank pages. this sucks!

[rootchick]

For those of you getting blank pages, have you tried deleting & reinstalling your printers in cups after installing cups-filters 1.0.16? That worked for me. Printing is still slow, though, and the IPP error is still there.

[Allin Gaijin]

Yep. I tried exactly what you did, rootchick. It didn't work for me.

[rootchick]

*Sigh*. I hope cups gets fixed soon. Even with installing cups-filters 0.16, things still aren't right. I've had all sorts of printing problems. Unfortunately, before I realized there were still issues, I decided to upgrade all our staff computers to it, and the last few days I've been driven buggy by printing issues. It seems unless you're printing something with a standard paper size with standard margins, there are issues--labels not printing correctly, incorrect margins, and I have one printer that I actually had to manually change the printer address to use pdl-datastream in order to get it work.

Oh yeah, and I managed to hose my computer trying to install cups-filters 0.18 and its dependencies from sid. The next day I tried installing gtk-recordmydesktop, and it decided that in order to resolve conflicts it had to uninstall 500+ packages, and I didn't realize it until after it was already uninstalling them, so I got to rebuild my computer yesterday. So I'm very glad it's Friday!

[deviceguru]

I just kicked Ubuntu off my desktop system after 5 years of what had been a good relationship, and have replaced it with LMDE. Like so many others, I was greatly turned off by Canonical's insistence on going down the Unity path; I wanted something more straightforward, but it had to be based on debian. So, I kept an eye on LMDE hoping that it would stabilize enough for me to risk switching to it as my primary desktop OS.

I invested a few days in bringing up a parallel installation of LMDE on my desktop system, to see how LMDE woudl perform. The current version appead to be everything I had hoped for ... until I tried printing, which resulted in the problems described in this post.

To make a long story short, after trying and failing to manually build the driver downloaded from HP's site (with numerous errors due to numerous unresolved dependencies), I instead downloaded the automated install (.run) version. It worked like a charm!

Basically: Go to http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/gethplip.html and click the "Download HPLIP" button. Then download the ".run" file for hplip (currently v3.12.4) automatic installation. Set it to executable permissions and run it, and be patient while it does its stuff. When it asked what version of linux I was installing it on, I selected Debian 6.0.4 (option 14), for LMDE testing (current version as of this post).

My HP Laserjet 1020 came up just fine once the automated driver installation process was finished. However, I can't vouch for any exotic functions or settings working -- I simply print with it via USB from my LMDE system. Goodbye Ubuntu, I wish you well!

[Bergschreck]

I found a solution for the problem with Brother printers:

Install the cupswrapper from Brothers website and use this instead of the foomatic drivers.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p= ... ostcount=9

[rootchick]

I ended up going with Mint 13 instead of LMDE. The issues seem to be fixed there.

[Bergschreck]

When you use Mint 13 you can take just as well Ubuntu Precise Pangolin. What's the difference?

The only differences are Mate and Cinnamon. Why not use Ubuntus gnome-panel instead?

[Allin Gaijin]

Thank you Bergshreck. My Brother MFC-7840W is working again.

[ptruchon]

@rootchick It seems that only cups-filters_1.0.18-2+b2 is now available on http://packages.debian.org and when I try to install it I get

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 Error: Dependency is not satisfiable: libfontconfig1 (>= 2.9.0) 

Any ideas?

[rootchick]

ptruchon, I'm afraid I can't be too helpful, other than advising you *not* to install the dependencies, since I ended up hosing a system that way. Because of the printing issues I've been using Mint 13 with MATE rather than LMDE, though I hope to be able to go back to it someday.

[ptruchon]

It seems that the problem is actually with python-cups, not with system-config-printer.

I installed python-cups_1.9.61-0.1 from http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepor ... =656640#58 and it solved the error message but not the non-printing problem.

I followed the instructions from https://phpraxis.wordpress.com/2012/07/ ... ntu-linux/ and it worked.