I had printing working in 8.0 with an Epson Stylus Color 600 and using cups with gimp-print. I just installed 8.1 and gimp-print and cups and it won't work. I can cat files to the device with a command like 'cat file.txt > /dev/lp0' and it works fine. I was able to print once within gimp but anything else doesn't even try to print. I even tried apsfilter and the test page looked nice but printing wouldn't work after that (something about the hostname). I was able to add the printer from the web interface and it said it was accepting jobs.

One thing I did do was look in the error messages in /var/log/cups. It said something about not being able to convert the files for printing. Anyone else having problems? The cups programs is in the extras directory. I think I'll try to compile it and see what happens then.

Slack 8.1 comes with cups-1.1.15, have a look at the note here about non postscript printers and follow the instructions or install cups-1.1.14.

I have an 8.1 install of Slack and I installed the CUPS 1.1.14 package from the extras directory that I had from the slackware-current tree. I used the pkgtool program to install it. I also enabled SWAT and setup the printers. I ran the "/etc/rc.d/rc.cups start" to get the daemon going.

I use a remote HP laserjet pinter with a JetDirect. It appears to be working just fine. I have printed the CUPS Test page and printed from the console prompt, KWord, and Abiword.

I also have a local parallel port Epson Photo 700 that appears to be working fine. I printed a doc from KWord with color text and the CUPS test page.

The conversion process I would think would start with the filter files. They are located in /usr/lib/cups/filter. I have 13 files there and they are called as required by cups to process the print job for the specified printer driver.

Also, I do not have any users setup on this machine so all was done above as user root. If you were a normal user then you might try root to see if it is a permission problem.

If you used a package from the second 8.0 CD then that might be the problem. You would then need to download from a mirror the right package for CUPS 1.1.14 that was built for 8.1. I only mention this because it doesn't note what version CUPS you installed.

Cheers,
James

The previous post by Aussie is correct about the newer version 1.1.15. I have not been able to update my current tree for awhile now. It was updated on June 12th and added on June 5th. The reference link provided above by Aussie should be highly considered. The Slack changelog also includes the ESP Ghostscript package added on June 5th also in the extras directory.

So if you installed CUPS 1.1.15 you should probably disregard my prior post.

Hats off to Aussie!

Cheers,
James

Thanks for the help. The problem was that I had to install the esp ghostscript package as well. I don't remember having to do that before so I suppose it is new. After that it worked fine.