[wplug-bsd] FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE Printer Issues

[Benjamin Slavin]

Good afternoon, all,

-----> BACKGROUND
For those of you following my self-inspired FreeBSD drama, I have once 
again installed the 4.x branch of FreeBSD after getting a phenomenal 
number of spin lock errors on 5.1-RELEASE with an SMP kernel. Error was:
    panic: spin lock sched lock held by 0xc151f130 for > 5 seconds
    cpuid = 1; lapic.id = 01000000
    [Repeat three more times]
I got the error often, especially when I was compiling large programs or 
other processor intensive things. I believe the cause was the sound card 
(SB Audigy) driver, but I don't have the time/patience to figure it out 
now... so I'm back with 4.9-RELEASE (sadly, having re-enabled on-board 
sound)

-----> MODERATELY DETAILED ACCOUNTING
Now the real problem... I have a HP DeskJet 880C running off of a USB 
connection. I installed GhostScript, and HPIJS, and followed the 
instructions in the FreeBSD Handbook 
[http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/printing.html] 
coupled with the instructions for LPD from linuxprinting.org 
[http://www.linuxprinting.org/lpd-doc.html] to get the printer up and 
running.

I am able to print ASCII text, without a problem, however, attempting to 
print PostScript files doesn't go so well. I first tried to download a 
page for alignment 
[http://www.linuxprinting.org/download/printing/align.ps] and print it, 
and found that it would print 0.25 to 2.0 inch sections at a time. That 
is, it would print the first two inches on the first page, then the next 
two inches on the next page, and so on. Also, color is not correct, and 
the positioning of the images on the page is also not always correct.

I tried to install CUPS, but that was a disaster. The port didn't work 
(produced errors, and I found reporting of similar circumstances 
online), so I compiled from source, and that was little better. It 
installed, it allowed me to configure the printer, but then refused to 
print. I became very dismayed when there was no "make uninstall" 
available, and realized that CUPS had polluted my system, so I decided 
to just disable it for now.

LPRng was my next hope, so I compiled the port, and tried to install it. 
CUPS had left, for example, lpc in a directory which was searched before 
the location for LPRng, so I was forced to manually uninstall all of 
CUPS. I did this, and configured LPRng with lprngtool, and some help 
from the linuxprinting page mentioned above. I had issues printing until 
I set /dev/ulpt0 to [chmod 777] (which I am not entirely comfortable 
doing). After doing this, the printer functioned exactly as with LPD. 
ASCII prints correctly, but PostScript does not.

I am using the foomatic-rip program from linuxprinting, so maybe this is 
the problem, but I cannot see how it would be.

-----> QUESTIONS
Does anyone have any suggestions for how to resolve this?

Is there any way for me to get back the original FreeBSD LPD without 
reinstalling?

-----> GRATITUDE
Thanks much,
 --Ben