I am lost in the Linux printer driver labyrinth!

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Hi all,

Let’s see if I will manage to make the problem understandable:

Ubuntu Studio 17.10.
Printer: 6-color Epson XP-960 ink jet.
Driver: Epson’s ESC/P-R 1.6.19.

Gutenprint does not offer a suitable driver.
Gimp 2.9.9 → Print does not work: “Job canceled as printer”.

CUPS add printer/print test page: works just fine.
darktable (yesterday’s git version)/print: works beautifully.

So, why on earth is The Gimp behaving in this way?
What might I have overlooked?

Sincerely,
Claes in Lund, Sweden

2

which version of gimp? IMHO, gimp’s print dialog need improvement. :smile:

3

Ooops, sorry. Versions added above.
/Claes

4

If you have a ppd file for your printer, might be possible to use gutenprint.

This using Kubuntu 16.04 and Gimp 2.9.9 (from ppa) No entry for my Brother printer, so setup as:

screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/wfeyish.jpg

The only ‘issue’ I had was the ppd file permissions, had to change those to read/write for everyone, otherwise Gimp sends error messages.

5

Thank you.
I will keep experimenting!

/Claes

6

I’d be happy to extract the PPD file for your from the Mac DMG

7

Good morning!

Thank you very much – but hopefully your kind offer will not be necessary
since it seems as if I have managed to circumvent the problem (after having
spent a ream of paper sheets and six oceans of ink drops).

It turned out that my problem was due to (at least) two oddities:

  1. Every time I (re)started CUPS, it automagically changed the driver from what I had picked
    to a driverless version (!).
  2. The printer was set for WiFi/Network printing.

I turned off WiFi/Network printing and connected the printer to the Linux box via a USB cable.
Then I just had to add the “new” printer into CUPS, where I could select the proper driver.

So far, everything seems to work just fine. I can even print from The Gimp 2.9.9.
After this detour, I can go back to my luvvely profile tweaking experiments
(spending new reams of paper and new oceans of ink drops) again…

Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden

8

Oh it sounds like you got the airprint driver, which is nice for printing business documents but not for much else! Glad you figured it out.