tony

I've got an issue I'm trouble shooting with an app that won't print. I can
print fine from the console prompt but not the app, even though it appears
to be configured correctly. I suspect the app might not be playing well
with CUPS, unfortunately I can't seem to get rid of CUPS to test this. I've
tried reinstalling on another system (using VMware, so this makes it easy)
and even though I'm not selecting any of the printing options, CUPS still
gets installed. If I try to remove it from add/remove packages I get an
error saying that it can't find 6 packages that it requires for
installation. I'm a Linux newbie who's looking for a quick and dirty way to
remove CUPS in order to test the standard Linux print options. Any
thoughts?

TIA
Tony

lenard

First you do realize that cups is now the standard Linux printing option
with RHEL4????

Second, you may not want to remove cups, try the following first from the
console or xterm session; rpm -e cups --allmatches --test

You may want to download and build the newer cups from FC4 so you can
install the cups-lpd rpm and hopefully resolve this issue;

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/4/i386/os/SRPMS/cups-1.1.23-15.src.rpm


--
"A personal computer is called a personal computer because it's yours,
Anything that runs on that computer, you should have control over."
Andrew Moss, Microsoft's senior director of technical policy, 2005

tony

That's the impression I got, I'm hoping I can just disable it or remove
while I trouble shoot the printing issue, or at least remove an
incompatibility with CUPS as a possible cause.

I get an error message back, specifically:
error: Failed dependancies:
/usr/bin/lp is needed by (installed) redhat-lsb-3.0-8.EL.i386
/usr/bin/lpr is needed by (installed) redhat-lsb-3.0-8.EL.i386
cups is needed by (installed) hal-cups-utils-0.5.2-8.i386
cups is needed by (installed) libgnomecups.0.1.12-5.i386
cups is needed by (installed) desktop-printing-0.17-3.EL.1.i386
cups >= 1.1.17-4 is needed by (installed)
system-config-printer-0.6.116.5-1.i386

My next step on this fresh system was to create a printer using the
Applications->System Settings-> Printing option, and after disabling the
firewall because the Linksys print server I have doesn't like it, I was able
to do a test print from the Printing utility. So as far as Linux goes, it
seems to be working, unless this is too low a level to be sure and the
errors above indicate that I'm still missing something.

My next step is to reinstall the app, which will take a few hours to copy
the necessary files, and then I'll give it another go.

I'll look at this after the app is in place, assuming that I still won't be
able to print. I'll post the results.

Thanks,
Tony

tony

I hit a road block that requires a bit of searching. The system prints fine
outside of the app, I can type "lp -dLP hosts" and get my hosts file (yeah,
the printer was given the name "LP", long before I came along). And it
prints the test page from the Printers configuration screen with no problem,
but when I try to print from teh app it never makes it to the queue and
doesn't get printed.

I downloaded the newer cups in order to install the cups-lpd rpm, but it
wouldn't install, I was told I needed dbus-devel >= than 0.31, so I
downloaded 0.33 from the same page as the one you pointed to for the cups
download and ran the installation, at which point it wouldn't install,
stating that I needed "Pyrex >= 0.9.3". So far I haven't been able to find
this, but I'll continue looking.

Tony

tony

Unfortunately it hasn't been as easy as that, I may try to track down what
is quickly becoming an endless list of dependancies tomorrow. Back to my
original question though, is there a way to remove cups in order to test
whether or not the problem is a cups/app compatibility issue?

Tony

lenard

Yes to both questions, removing cups will not accomplish your goal however.

Every other printing test you posted has worked, so the problem seems to be
with this unnamed application. Maybe this application is to old to deal
with cups printing.

But who am I to stop you, remember that nice list of applications that
depend on cups?? You need to remove them first then remove cups. It would
be a really good idea to test remove them first (do not forget about
removing system-config-printer also, I'm just keeping the command below
limited to one line with no word wrap);

rpm -e redhat-lsb hal-cups-utils libgnomecups desktop-printing --test

You may need to remove additional files depending on the output from the
above command. When you finally get done removing all the files that need
to be removed you can finally remove cups;

rpm -e cups --allmatches

If you give up before this point I do understand, like I said cups is now
the default printing option with RHEL4.


--
"A personal computer is called a personal computer because it's yours,
Anything that runs on that computer, you should have control over."
Andrew Moss, Microsoft's senior director of technical policy, 2005

tony

Sorry, not trying to be secretive, it's an app developed by a local company
called "Event" that utilizes a Providex database. Normally the programmers
are quite good at addressing issues for us but right now we've got them
swamped with another project. I've sent an e-mail early yesterday asking if
they're compatible with cups but haven't heard back yet. Their main
programmer will be at our office tomorrow at which time I can nail him down
and have him take a look.


So far the whole thing has been in a test environment, right now I've got 4
identical systems on a ESX server, makes it easy to blow things away and
start over. I think I'll leave cups as is based on what you wrote above
about removing dependencies and just see if I can't get the issue resolved
with the help from the guys that wrote the app.

I'm giving up on trying to update or remove cups until after the programmers
have answered my question about cups compatibility, in the meantime I've got
2 Digi Port server II's to configure and test. With what I know about Linux
this should keep me occupied today. :-)

Thanks for the info.

Tony

m. trimble

Looks like that app might be your problem. Note the quoted lines above. You
assert that you can successfully print a test page from your configuration
utility and that you can print out a file (I'm guessing it's unformatted
text - at least I've never heard of a hosts file being anything other than
raw text) from the command line.

If the other posts are any indication, you're printing from a database. Two
questions come to mind. First, are you bringing back any rows from even
one table? Don't laugh. I was working in a client/server environment and my
client software (manufactured by Seagate, if that's a clue) was producing
rows on screen, but the printed version was blank. Turns out there was an
obscure cache the screen dump was presenting, not the actual query result.
Second, is there a bug in the app? And for this discussion, the term 'bug'
includes missed characters in the source code.

HTH

tony

Oddly enough that went quite well, installed the package for digi and set
the serial printers up using the GUI as /dev/ttyaxx devices and the app in
question printed to them with no problem.

Tony

lenard

So, cups is OK, the app is OK it was designed to print to a serial printer
via a certain interface??? Maybe the programmers need to re-think the apps
printing interface capabilities.


--
"A personal computer is called a personal computer because it's yours,
Anything that runs on that computer, you should have control over."
Andrew Moss, Microsoft's senior director of technical policy, 2005