HP PS7150: text doesn't print in OOo and Abiword!

[Guest gabba]

Hi, I have a HP Photosmart 7150 printer, which was automatically recognised and installed by Mandriva Linux LE 2005. According to LinuxPrinting.org this printer should work perfectly with HPIJS drivers.

 

However I'm experimenting the weirdest problem I experienced with Linux yet: when printing from OpenOffice 1.1.4, the images print, but not the text. However, the print head does go back and forth on the paper as if it was trying to print the text. I installed Abiword and I have the exact same problem in that program.

 

What makes things weirder is that I can print a test page without problems, and printing also works from Firefox. But I absolutely need printing to work directly from openoffice, as I'm setting up this computer for people that I'd like to convert from Windows.

 

On top of that, I now see a weird kernel error when I boot up, about a usb module that cannot load because something is already in the kernel (I'll copy the exact message as soon as I can, I'm typing from another computer). I'm not sure if that error happened before I reconfigured the printer through the Mandrake Control Center to make sure everything was fine.

 

I experienced almost the exact same thing a week ago when I tried Ubuntu Linux on that computer, except that in that case I was able to print text that I typed into a new OOo document, but not text that I pasted from, say, Firefox. It puzzles me to have the same problem under two very different distributions, especially since it doesn't seem to be a hardware problem (Firefox and test pages print perfectly fine).

 

Any idea? I'm getting to know Linux quite a bit, but here I'm really lost, and this could jeopardize acceptance of Linux by my friends, which is bad.

 

The computer is an old IBM PIII (around 500MHz); the printer, a HP Photosmart 7150 plugged though USB. I use no other USB device on that computer (well I did plug in a usb pen drive once, but that's it).

[jboy]

Did you use CUPS? If so, this is a total guess as to whether it applies in your situation, but I remember I had something similar when I set up my HP laserjet printer drivers using CUPS. There was a choice of several drivers, e.g., GhostScript/hpijs, Ghostscript +hpijs, GhostScript + gimp-print-ijs, etc. There were 5 different choices.

 

The initial one I chose (which was the recommended one) gave me behavior similar to your situation. I chose another one and then it worked fine.

 

Just a thought, maybe it applies to your situation.

 

EDIT: In a clearer state of mind after I posted the above, I realized that the driver issue I referred to happened on an Epson Stylus CX6600 printer, not an HP laserjet. Exact same details though - one driver gave incomplete or even no text output and a different driver worked perfectly. So the suggestion stands - does one of the other available drivers work ok?

Edited August 3, 2005 by jboy

[scarecrow]

Open a console and type in

lsmod

You must see two modules named usbcore and usblp loaded. If not, load them manually from your console (as root):

insmod usblp

Cups daemon should be running, of course.

Likely you will have problems even after doing the above, though:

I think your problem is because HP does not issue any open .ppd drivers for Photosmart printers- but there are commercial ones which work with CUPS:

http://www.easysw.com/printpro/printers.php

or

http://www.turboprint.de/english.html

Of course it does not make much sense paying more for making your hardware doing what-is-supposed-to-do, and you should complain to HP about that (although unlikely to pick a good answer)- but it happens with other companies as well (e.g. Canon).

[Guest gabba]

Well, I erased the printer in PrintDrake, and I reinstalled it. I used the default options (Ghostscript +hpijs was proposed as the driver, I didn't change that either). Now, for some reason, it works. I guess something was not detected the right way when I installed the OS.

 

lsmod tells me that both usbcore and usblp are loaded. What is weird is that I still get that error message at bootup:

 

FATAL: Module usblp already in kernel.

FATAL: Error running install command for usblp

FATAL: Error running install command for printer

 

It's as if the kernel had that module compiled in, and some program is trying to load it anyways? I haven't customized my kernel or anything like that, though.

 

Thanks for you quick reply to my first message. Even though it works, I'd like to understand what the error message above is all about - who knows, it may be of interest to future forum visitors...

Edited August 4, 2005 by gabba