My Epson Stylus Photo 870 printer started misbehaving ... but only when connected to my debian (Sarge) PC. Plugged into a Win98SE PC it worked fine.
The principal symptom was that it would print in monochrome red when it was supposed to be printing black. Color images would not print at all. I attempted fixing it by deleting the printer and reinstalling it; I chose a different driver: Epson Stylus Photo 870 Foomatic/Stp870p.upp. It still won't print correctly; only partial colors even though the printer test pages available through the OpenOffice.org printer management GUI or the CUPS GUI both look OK. Photos won't print completely - just a few spots here and there. When I invoke lpoptions -l in terminal it says there's no PPD file for this printer. In Mozilla Firefox it tries to print but nothing happens after it starts the spooling process and CUPS says there are no jobs in the queue. In OpenOffice 1.1 it prints black OK but images are incomplete in that only a few spots of color appear. When I invoke mtink in terminal it says that the colored inks are getting used up willy nilly even though next to no color has actually ended up on the paper. It looks to me as though the printer installation (which I did through the CUPS GUI interface) wasn't completed. What do I do next ? For a while I thought I'd just give up on this printer and connect it instead to a Windows PC ... but then I found out that Epson printers are just about the best ones to use with Linux. So I'd have an even worse hassle with a new printer. George Langford [EMAIL PROTECTED]
