On Sun, 19 Aug 2012 15:35:16 +0100 Lisi lisi.reisz@gmail.com wrote:

Hi all!

I have had the following cris de coeur from the user of a computer that I administer. "The old system" means Debian Lenny with KDE 3.5.10, which is still there on a separate partition and can be booted into from Grub.

I had previously successfully installed Debian Squeeze with Trinity 3.5.12 on his wife's laptop without a problem, and it is running well, including printing and scanning. The installation for the wife was from scratch and there was nothing to restore. The husband had a lot to restore.

The printer and scanner form part of an aio, a Lexmark Interact C605.

The initial problem with the printer was that when I came to install it on a 64 bit system (Lenny had been 32 bit) I found that the driver was only available in a 32 bit version. I found a 64 bit driver - not on Lexmark's site, of course :-( - and all seemed to be well. The story carries on below in emails from the owner of the machines. I am baffled as to how a driver can work one minute and not the next. :-( I do hope that I haven't managed to install some sort of malware masquerading as a driver.

12/08/07 (yy/mm/dd)

<quote> We still have some snags with the new system I'm afraid.

1)The scanner will not work although it still does in the old system so I know the scanner is working OK.

2)The printer works from e-mail OK except that it will not print attachments which are in PDF although I can read them aok.

</quote>

12/08/16

<quote> The printer which was working aok in the new system (apart from pdf format)has now ceased to function completely again although it is working still in the old system. </quote>

His wife can still print from her laptop.

I had expected to find that the problem with the scanner was a matter of groups and permissions, but it would appear not; or anyhow, not entirely.

Any suggestions for solutions, other than reinstall with 32 bit and Trinity 3.5.12, gratefully received. Though this is beginning to look like the only viable solution.

I ought, of course, to have checked, before I abandoned 32 bit, that all the necessary drivers were available in 64 bit. :-(

I'm not sure what version of CUPS goes with which Debian version, but there was a change in how CUPS handles USB (moved to a different kernel driver, IIRC) sometime around version 1.4 that caused problems on some people's systems. Printer working but scanner not suggests two different drivers fighting over the same USB connection, which was happening with some multifunction devices under the new system right after the switch--if the scanner driver got a lock, it would explain why it's now failing to print. I think the quick-and-ugly fix for that one was to manually unload the kernel module for whichever USB driver wasn't in use at a given time; the longer-term one involved CUPS and filter upgrades, or quashing the new USB infrastructure by passing a specific switch, possibly --disable-libusb, to CUPS at compile time.

PDFs not printing but everything else working suggests a bad output filter (at one time, my Epson multifunction was *only* able to print PDFs, because a filter kept failing on everything else).

There should be something in the general system error log if it's a driver thrash. Failed filter would be recorded in the CUPS logs (although CUPS might need to be in debug mode).