Attached a brand-new and fully functional basic laser printer (Brother HL L2321D), that supports USB-only connection to host PC. The host PC is running Ubuntu MATE 20.04. Have installed manufacturer supplied printer driver, and also attempted to use closest generic printer with foomatic drivers (as per manufacturer instructions for getting this printer working on OpenBSD for which no official drivers for this printer are available). The printer was originally attached through a USB2.0 hub, but later connected it directly to the desktop PC, but this change didn't solve the problems, nor did the change of printer type.
The problem I am facing is that documents seem to print, erratically and I cannot quite put my finger on which documents print, when and why, while others don't. For instance, I managed to print 2 pages of a LibreOffice doc without issues, then I managed to print first 2 pages of a 4-page PDF document containing scanned images, but not the last 2 pages. When I retry printing the same PDF again, none of the pages got printed, but CUPS dashboard (http://localhost:631/) reports the job as being completed. After I restarted the PC and printer, I could again print the first 2 pages but not the last 2 pages of the PDF. Then I could print from Firefox browser. All of these jobs are marked as completed, and I can see all of the corresponding c* and d* files in /var/spool/cups like this:
Code:
-rw------- 1 root lp 1085 Sep 27 19:24 c00008
-rw------- 1 root lp 1142 Sep 27 19:26 c00009
-rw------- 1 root lp 1113 Sep 27 19:27 c00010
-rw------- 1 root lp 1099 Sep 27 19:37 c00011
-rw------- 1 root lp 975 Sep 27 19:40 c00012
-rw------- 1 root lp 1099 Sep 27 19:48 c00013
-rw------- 1 root lp 1085 Sep 27 19:49 c00014
-rw------- 1 root lp 1075 Sep 27 19:50 c00015
-rw------- 1 root lp 1085 Sep 27 20:00 c00016
-rw-r----- 1 root lp 1001334 Sep 27 19:24 d00008-001
-rw-r----- 1 root lp 1939026 Sep 27 19:26 d00009-001
-rw-r----- 1 root lp 1591467 Sep 27 19:27 d00010-001
-rw-r----- 1 root lp 181213 Sep 27 19:37 d00011-001
-rw-r----- 1 root lp 234 Sep 27 19:40 d00012-001
-rw-r----- 1 root lp 181213 Sep 27 19:48 d00013-001
-rw-r----- 1 root lp 1001334 Sep 27 19:49 d00014-001
-rw-r----- 1 root lp 1001335 Sep 27 19:50 d00015-001
-rw-r----- 1 root lp 1001334 Sep 27 20:00 d00016-001
drwxrwx--T 3 root lp 4096 Sep 27 19:48 tmp
Please note that I had already tested this printer earlier in the day with my work laptop running Windows 10 Enterprise, by printing various documents of various types -- Word doc, PDF, Excel, image from Paint etc., ranging from 1 page to 5 pages, all worked fine.
How can I troubleshoot to find what's going on ? Why am I not able to reliably print the entire document each time ? Why are the c* and d* files piling up, and why does CUPS show that the job is completed when it is clearly not. Note that even when files don't get printed, I can hear the print (which is perhaps on standby) wake-up and whirr a bit (similar to when printing actually does happen), but the whirring does down shortly after.
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