Epson Photo890, escputil, Cups and near-empty cartridges - Linux Setup, Configuration & Administration

[Keith]

Hello, all.

I ran into a very annoying problem last night.

I was trying to print a PDF doent, and getting nowhere. I knew my
colour cartridge was nearly empty, and had used escputil to check ink
levels (the Cyan was down to 3%), but decided to print B&W anyway.

Maybe I made a mistake, because I got a sheet of colour printout that must
have used the last bit of Cyan ink.

After this, the printer refused to work, Cups and escputil couldn't help
me. I would send a job to the printer, get no sign of life from the
hardware, look at the print queue and see a job. Try to cancel it, print
again, still no movement... Tried looking with the net-basd admin tool
(localhost:631), and got "client-server error"... If I tried escputil, I
would just get no response... no messages came back from the command.

It loks to my inexpert eye, as if the printer simply refuses to
communicate if one of the ink cartridges is empty... Is this right?
Is this a well-known problem with this Epson printer?


Keith.

[root]

On Sunday 16 November 2003 09:55 Keith wrote:
 
I've run into this too, so it may be safe to assume thats the case. 

--
Cheers, Gene
A mostly retired old coot

[Keith]

On Mon, 17 Nov 2003 01:01:04 +0000, root wrote:
 
snip 
> I've run into this too, so it may be safe to assume thats the case. [/ref]

Great, Gene.

Two of us have had this problem and wondered why...

So at a guess, a hundred thousand just replaced the cartridge as soon as
the little light started blinking, and never gave it a second thought.


Keith.

[Edwin]

On Tue, 18 Nov 2003 22:17:39 +0100, Keith <zz> wrote: 
>snip [/ref][/ref]
 

I have an Epson Stylus Color 600 and it has done the same thing except that
I'm using LPRing and often spews out pages of trash unless I clear the spool
buffers and sometimes have to stop lpd. This has happened even with ink ok,
as if connections were handshaking correctly. Clear everything out, turn off
the printer, and it then probably will go merrily along as if nothing
happened. Hmmmm... (Maybe I really want a new printer. haahaa)

....Edwin

--
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