How to stop printer from printing garbage
 

Oh dear!

I am trying to get an HP Laserjet printer to work with my Debian3.1 system.

Prior to installing cupsys and hp-ppd I thought I might try and see what happens if I printed something. So I clicked File-->Print in my Firefox browser window.

Shortly after that, the printer started to print, but just garbage. Now the printer wont stop feeding paper and printing one line of garbage on random pages.

If I switch the printer off and back on again, it continues to print garbage. It's being doing this for days now, even after rebooting linux.

Does anyone know what process is sending this garbage to the printer?

Myself and numerous trees will be most grateful if anyone out there can help :)

Cheers,
Greenie

... and you sent a load of incorrectly formatted garbage to the printer queue.
Linux will do its best to try & print this, even through reboots: linux does not give up easily!

I'd suggest you leave the printer off, install cups, go to its admin screen (http://localhost:631) and clear the printer queue. Otherwise, you cound have a look around in /var/spool/* and try to find the printer queue - delete it (you'll need to be root).

HTH

There are two things you can do.

But first, understand what you did.

When you send info to a printer without a driver, it reads the information just straight.

Every line has a paper feed command.

There is a cancel button on the printer. You can keep pressing the button until the printer stops.

There is also a print queue manager in the debian menu under "apps>system". You can open this and cancel the print job.

Either one will solve the problem.

I would recommend stoping the printing through the Debian system rather than on the printer. If you do not have a driver installed, the cancel button on the printer might not be recognized and will continue to print when the spooler is started up again.

I feel your pain. here's where I documented my soap opera:

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthre...=Firefox+crash

and

http://www.pclinuxonline.com/modules...=7257&forum=53


To make a very long story short. I gave up after beating my head against a wall on this. I recommend either Opera, who beiing a fee-based product when out of there way to correctly handle IE-specific tags, or Konqeuror, which requires a KDE-based distro.

Thanks heaps for the ideas and info, most useful.

Eventually it did stop. The reason why it was doing it = no driver !

CUPS was also not installed, but I think I started another thread on the topic of CUPS somewhere here. But eventually got CUPS working too.

Now the printing is fine and I am a happy person once again :)