Setup and Configuration V

Special tools

Some printers require special tools for maintenance. Among the printers supported by Linux Mandrake 7.2, the Epson Stylus ink-jets and the Lexmark ink-jets are such printers.

"escputil" for Epson

The Epson Stylus ink-jet printers feature a different technology than most of the other ink-jets from HP, Canon, Lexmark, and so on.
Most ink-jet printers have their print head (the ink nozzles) integrated in the ink cartridge, so when the cartridge is empty, not only the cartridge but also the print head gets changed. This way the print heads are renewed regularly and the risk of having clogged nozzles is not that high. The Epson Stylus printers have a permanent print head, and the cartridges are just ink tanks and nothing more.

So the print heads need special care not to get clogged, because this would make the whole printer unusable. One can press the nozzle-cleaning button on the printer when printouts get bad (i.e. horizontal light stripes). For more comfortable maintenance, there is the tool escputil. It features head cleaning, printing nozzle-check pattern, head aligning, ink-level information, and printer identity information. For more information, choose "Configuration"/"Printing"/"Epson inkjet printer maintenance" in the desktop menus or type escputil | less on the command line.

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Tools for Lexmark

The Lexmark ink-jets have another problem. Most of them are so-called "win-printers", they are not only depleted of memory and built-in fonts to make them cheap, but also there aren't any types of buttons or indicator lights. Thus - for example - getting the print head to an accessible position to change the cartridges and getting it back afterward is realized by a Windows program giving the appropriate commands to the printer. Other maintenance tasks like nozzle cleaning, head alignment, printing test patterns, and so on are realized by special Windows programs, too. For many of these functions there are already appropriate programs in Linux Mandrake 7.2, mostly run from the command line, but there's also a graphical utility.

If you install a Lexmark printer with 'PrinterDrake', these maintenance tools get installed automatically. If you have installed your Lexmark printer with another program, you should install the tools with:

urpmi ghostscript-utils

These tools are available:

• pup - Graphical program for the Lexmark Optra 40 and 45 printers, it probably works for the Lexmark 5xxx and 7xxx, too
• showcartridges, hidecartridges, headalign, headclean - Command line programs for the Lexmark 5xxx and 7xxx printers
• changecartridge - Another command line tool for changing the ink cartridges in the Lexmark 5xxx and 7xxx
• lm1100change, lm1100back - Command line tools for changing the cartridge in Lexmark 1xxx printers

These programs are also available in the desktop menus under "Configuration"/"Printing". You'll find documentation for these programs in '/usr/share/doc/ghostscript-utils-[...]/LexmarkMaintenance/ directory.

These programs do not really do head-aligning, but they print the appropriate test patterns for aligning the print heads. For doing the head-aligning, you have to start 'Kups' and right-click on the symbol of the appropriate printer, choose "Configure printer" in the pop-up menu and look for "Head Adjustments" in the options. Change them and look whether the output quality of the test patterns improves. Users who prefer command line utilities should check out man lpoptions and lphelp.

Not all drivers offer head alignment, check whether you have installed one of these drivers:

• Lexmark 5000, Foomatic + lx5000 (1200x600 dpi Colour or BW)
• Lexmark 5700, Foomatic + lxm5700m (600 dpi BW)
• Lexmark Z51, Foomatic + lx5000 (1200x600 dpi Colour or BW)

Notice that you have to repeat the head-alignment every time after changing an ink cartridge.

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Security Level

If you have set up your system with "high" or "paranoid" security level (levels 4 and 5), CUPS will probably not work correctly. To fix this, try these (see also Chapter 12 of the Mandrake Linux Reference Guide):

• When the CUPS daemon is not running at all (Error: "Unable to connect to CUPS server, check options." or similar, or ps auxwww|grep cupsd does not show a process entry for cupsd) add cups to '/etc/security/msec/init-sh/server.4' and/or '/etc/security/msec/init-sh/server.5'. This will make it a 'trusted service' in level "high" and/or "paranoid" respectively.
  Then issue these commands:

  chkconfig --add cups
service cups start

• If the CUPS daemon is running and you cannot access your local printers from a remote machine in the "high" security level and also not from the local machine in the "paranoid" security level, edit '/etc/hosts.deny' and '/etc/hosts.allow' to allow access from your local machine and from machines of your local network. This access is blocked by default in "high" and "paranoid" security mode. Type man hosts.access for more information about setting up '/etc/hosts.deny' and '/etc/hosts.allow'.

• "High" and "paranoid" security mode might block port 631 (I haven't seen that happen, though). So you should try to run CUPS over an unprivileged port (> 1024). Edit '/etc/cups/cupsd.conf' on all your machines to use another port. Enter the desired port number (must be the same for all machines) in the Port line. Restart the CUPS daemon on all your machines with service cups restart. In kupsdconf enter the port in the section "Network".

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