Hey everyone, I've been running Sid on a Blue nad White G3 for the better part of a year now, and am finally trying to track down the origin of a severe printing problem. I've been unable to solve the problem even by taking pretty drastic measures, e.g., removing CUPS and switching to pdq or LPRng, upgrading to kernel 2.6.x... nothing hasworked so far.
I have two printers, both connectedo n USB -- one color dotmatrix (canon s520) and one laser printer (brother hl-1440). Both work perfectly well with the same hardware connections when the g3 is booted up in Macos 9 (not that I do that anymore...). But from linux, I have similar problems on both: 'garbage' symbols (hearts, question marks, accented letters, and other pictorial images, mostly) that cut across the page, and page splitting -- that is, a single page will be pritned across two, three, or even four physical pages. Sometimes large numbers of sheets of paper will spew out of the printer with just a single line of garbage on the top. As I said, the hardware is fine. I assume, then, that the problem is somewhere else: in the postscript conversion programs? But I use the regular, recommended methods for generating postscript (a2ps with lprng, the cups filters with cups). The usb-printer /usb-lp drivers? But surely I'd have heard of a big problem like this if other people had it, too? - something wrong with the underlying usb driver for the g3 hardware... I suppose that's posible, but again, seems like I would haveheard about soething so serious by now... Anyway, it's a serious issue, and one I'd like to fix. Anyone seen anything like this before? Any troublehooting suggestions? thanks as always, matt