Konica Minolta C250 Printing Problems
23 Aug 2008
A month ago I wrote about our problems printing to our colour photocopier. Well this problem is still hurting us. I have tried setting up cups to work by lpr, ipp, http, socket and jetdirect. Amazingly I was able to print CUPS test pages from most of these, but without it making any difference to the problem. I have tried switching off CUPS in Iceweasel, so that it prints via kprinter (see Configure Iceweasel to print via kprinter), but amazingly the problem continues.
Looking through the CUPS error.log, I noted an error on locale, so I reconfigured:
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
And I added the three en_GB locales, and set the UTF-8 as the default. I also change the test web-page to use en_GB. This eradicated the error messages, but did not induce the photocopier to print.
I have tried using four different PPDs from Konica Minolta and from OpenPrinting.org, but without any difference.
This is without doubt the most intractable problem that I have as yet encountered in Linux.
Interestingly, I was able to print the same webpage from Iceweasel3 from my new Debian Sid PC. When setting up the printer the PPD was already available from within CUPS, which I will need to investigate further, although my suspicion is that the key change is the browser. Maybe I need to upgrade to Iceweasel 3, although this is only available in Experimental at present, which would not be sensible for our LTSP server.
I do feel that I am between a rock and a hard place.