[ale] Epson CX8400 on Ubuntu

[JK]

Paul Cartwright wrote:
> On Sat November 28 2009, JK wrote:
>> I have an Epson Stylus CX8400 multifunction inkjet that I got for my
>> daughter. It works fine on her Mac Mini under OSX, and under XP on
>> my laptop.  Out of curiosity, I plugged it into my Ubuntu 9.10 box;
>> it was immediately recognized, and a test page printed successfully.
> 
> what printer driver are you using??
> did you check linuxprinting.org & their database?
> http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/openprinting/database/databaseintro
> 
> I use the gutenprint driver:
> http://www.openprinting.org/show_driver.cgi?driver=gutenprint
> for my Epson R380..


Also using Gutenprint here.  Not with any particular intention --
I just plugged in the printer and let Ubuntu do its thing.

Anyway, this is solved now.  As it turned out, somehow in the process
of physically moving the printer from the XP laptop to the Ubuntu
desktop, the black print-head became completely clogged.  It had
been printing just fine, but after the move, only the color inks
would flow.  This seems like a pretty weird failure mode, and the
psychology of it was interesting: I printed the printer's internal
nozzle-check pattern (consisting of four grids, one in each ink color)
and it looked fine -- cyan grid, magenta grid, yellow grid -- but I
completely failed to notice that the black grid was entirely absent!
After a couple hours of trying to print plain B&W text files from
various apps, and a lot of blank pages and "*&$^@%$&" kind of language,
finally I printed a Python buffer from Xemacs, and all the colored
syntax hi-lighting came thru, but none of the plain black text. This
was the sharp end of the clue stick. I moved the printer back to the
XP machine and had the same problem.  So several print-head-cleaning
cycles later, all is well.

-- JK