It's happened! My Brother laser printer no longer works in Slackware
by hazel from LinuxQuestions.org on (#6M631)
It used to work perfectly well using Brother's proprietary driver. Cups has been warning for some time that old usb printers are going to stop working and that seems to have happened now.
What happens is that cups passes the file through and it disappears from the queue but nothing actually comes out of the printer. In my experience, that usually indicates a printer driver error.
The cups error file in /var/log is full of errors and warnings that I am using obsolete technology.
The same printer works out of AntiX without any problems, using a non-proprietary driver called brlaser. I'm going to try building this in Slack tomorrow; there is a slackbuild for it but it needs cmake, which I don't have installed at the moment.
If that doesn't work, I will just have to do my printing out of AntiX. Fortunately I only need to print occasionally, which is why I bought a laser printer in the first place.
Oops! I had another look at that cups error file and saw, hiding among all the warnings and spurious errors (missing this and missing that), a genuine error that I could understand. A missing filter in a non-existent subdirectory of /usr/lib64/cups. I do have the file in the /opt tree, so I put in a link to it and we shall see if the printer works tomorrow.
What happens is that cups passes the file through and it disappears from the queue but nothing actually comes out of the printer. In my experience, that usually indicates a printer driver error.
The cups error file in /var/log is full of errors and warnings that I am using obsolete technology.
The same printer works out of AntiX without any problems, using a non-proprietary driver called brlaser. I'm going to try building this in Slack tomorrow; there is a slackbuild for it but it needs cmake, which I don't have installed at the moment.
If that doesn't work, I will just have to do my printing out of AntiX. Fortunately I only need to print occasionally, which is why I bought a laser printer in the first place.
Oops! I had another look at that cups error file and saw, hiding among all the warnings and spurious errors (missing this and missing that), a genuine error that I could understand. A missing filter in a non-existent subdirectory of /usr/lib64/cups. I do have the file in the /opt tree, so I put in a link to it and we shall see if the printer works tomorrow.