Q I have a dual boot system (Windows XP and SUSE 10.1) and a Canon LBP-1120 laser printer. As stated, the printer works fine on the Windows system. The problem is that try as I might, I cannot make it do anything on the Linux setup. I have downloaded and installed the CAPT drivers (numerous times) and then gone through the printer configuration and generally, nothing happens. The most that has happened is that occasionally the printer will send a piece of paper through, with nothing printed on it. Apart from that, anything that I try to print just stays in the print queue, unless I email it to myself and use Windows to do the printing.
A This is a 'Winprinter' - one that uses the driver to do part of the work of the firmware. As with their cousins, Winmodems, getting Winprinters to work with anything but Windows can be a frustrating process that is not always successful. You have a choice of drivers for this printer: there is the official Canon driver, which is the one I guess you have tried, and one recommended on www.linuxprinting org that is available from www.boichat.ch/nicolas/capt. I suggest you try both of these drivers and also follow the advice given for this printer at http://linuxprinting.org/show_printer. cgi?recnum=Canon-LBP-1120. When diagnosing printer problems, your first step should be to check the CUPS log files. Type
tail -f /var/log/cups/error_log
in a terminal, then try to print a page. You should see messages written to the error log in the terminal. This often gives a clue as to the cause. By default, the logged messages are quite limited. If you need more information, edit /etc/cups/cupsd.conf (as root), find the line
LogLevel info
and change 'info' to 'debug' Restart CUPS, either from Yast or the terminal with
/etc/init.d/cups restart
Now the error_log will contain much more detail. As a general point of advice, any Linux user should check the printer database at www.linuxprinting.org before investing in a printer.