Printer Only Prints One Page, If Anything

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I’ve got a Brother HL-L2360D series printer connected to CentOS 7. CUPS lists it as Generic PCL6/PCL Printer – CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.9 . When I tell it to print a pdf file, it prints at most the first page.

After powering the thing off and turning it on again, it printed page 3 of pages 3-6 . On trying it again, the thing claimed it was receiving data and printed page 3 of pages 3-6 again.

I’ve tried to delete the printer so I could add it again, but CUPS won’t let me. CUPS quit asking for a password, it just says Forbidden.

How do I print the pdf file?
How do I keep this from happening again?

This is not the first time I’ve had to do a deep dive into CUPS or something to get printing done.

I gave up on HP printers because I had to buy new cartridges practically every time I wanted to print. Only being able to print the first page, if anything, is not much of an improvement.

My girlfriend has an HP printer that works, so I suppose they are not all like mine.

22 thoughts on - Printer Only Prints One Page, If Anything

  • After systemctl restart cups trying to print pages 3-6 cause the Brother to receive data and go back to sleep.

  • Print test page produces the same result.

    CentOS 7 is on a physical system. Nothing is virtual or contained.

    List all jobs shows that all today’s jobs are either 17, 4 or 2 pages each. Those numbers are correct in the sense that they are what I tried to print.

  • The page does not work for me. For some reason, the Downloads box has no text and no clickable places, the cloud is not clickable and the Downloads label is not clickable.

  • Try a different web browser. I just tried it with firefox on CentOS 7 and it worked fine.

    You do have to allow javascript, though.

  • My 2360D works fine on C7, but I did install the Brother drivers.

    I configured it on C8 without the Brother drivers, using CUPS at port
    631 where it appears to work properly, though I’ve not printed a lot on it from c8.

    On C8 CUPS reports that I configured it thusly:

    Brother HL-2460 – CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.14

  • If attachments can be sent thru this list, see the attached image, a screnshot from Firefox on C7.

    The OK button is not enabled until you choose either RPM or DEB.

  • Where is “the directory where the drivers are”?
    I expect somewhere under /usr/share/cups. Correct?
    I really don’t like guessing, especially while doing root stuff.

  • I’ve been trying to folow directions, but no go. The bad ELF interpreter really through me for a loop:

    [root@localhost drv]# rpm -ihv –nodeps ~hennebry/Downloads/*.rpm Preparing… ################################# [100%]
    Updating / installing…
    1:hll2360dcupswrapper-3.2.0-1 ################################# [100%]
    lpadmin -p HLL2360D -E -v usb://Brother/HL-L2360D%20series?serial=U63883B7N499687 -P /usr/share/ppd/brother/brother-HLL2360D-cups-en.ppd restorecon: lstat(/etc/opt/brother/Printers/HLL2360D) failed: No such file or directory warning: %post(hll2360dcupswrapper-3.2.0-1.i386) scriptlet failed, exit status 255
    [root@localhost drv]# rpm -ihv –nodeps ~hennebry/Downloads/*lpr*.rpm Preparing… ################################# [100%]
    Updating / installing…
    1:hll2360dlpr-3.2.0-1 ################################# [100%]
    /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.1omOJ2: /opt/brother/Printers/HLL2360D/inf/braddprinter: /lib/ld-linux.so.2: bad ELF interpreter: No such file or directory
    [root@localhost drv]# ls cupsfilters.drv hp sample.drv
    [root@localhost drv]# ls -F
    cupsfilters.drv hp/ sample.drv
    [root@localhost drv]# pwd
    /usr/share/cups/drv
    [root@localhost drv]# ls ~/D*/*.rpm ls: cannot access /root/D*/*.rpm: No such file or directory
    [root@localhost drv]# ls ~hennebry/D*/*.rpm
    /home/hennebry/Downloads/hll2360dcupswrapper-3.2.0-1.i386.rpm
    /home/hennebry/Downloads/hll2360dlpr-3.2.0-1.i386.rpm
    [root@localhost drv]#

    What happened?
    How do I do it right?

  • Apparently both rpms are installed, but even after restarting cups, the printer just receives data and goes back to sleep.

    I have no /etc/printcap.local or /etc/printcap .
    /etc/cups/printers.conf does not contain the string lp . It does have DeviceURI usb://Brother/HL-L2360D%20series?serial=U63883B7N499687

    Now what?

  • Thanks. I just tried the installer helper. It seem to run, but didn’t help. I tried deleting cups and starting over. That is not working very well either. When I try to add a printer, 631 just tells me Forbidden, no request for a password, just Forbidden. Now I cannot even ask for printing.

    Methinks I’ve reached my frustration limit for the day.

  • I had tried that also, but tried it again. before my last try, I power-cycled the printer. This time it worked. For some reason CUPS now shows two queue names:
    HL-L2360D-series Brother HL-L2360D series localhost.localdomain HL-L2360D HLL2360D
    both Brother HL-L2360D for CUPS .

    ‘Tain’t as big a deal as having none, but why does CUPS have two queue names for the printer?

    I think they were the same packages that I tried to use. In any case, they both ended in 386.

    Had not heard of system-config-printer . Neither man, info nor –help helped. What is it suppoded to do?
    Google suggests it is a GUI. Google also suggests that it is always started through a GUI. Is it under Sundry, Print Settings?

    My printer worked in July. At the time, it did not have Brother drivers. I don’t know what update broke it or how.

    Is there an easy way to rename or alias a queue?

  • ‘Fraid I have no clue. sorry.

    we have two brother printers here, and when I look at “manage printers” in the CUPS web page I see this:

    Queue Name Description Location Make and Model Status DCP7065DN DCP7065DN Brother DCP7065DN for CUPS Idle HLL2360D HLL2360D Brother HL-L2360D for CUPS Idle

    one per printer. Is it possible that one of yours is cruft left over from previous attempts? You said it works now,… does that mean you can choose either of the two it shows and get printouts?

    I’m using the MATE desktop, so it may be that Gnome 3.x no longer has it, or has renamed it. Can’t help you there.

    But it is a gui you use to configure printers.

    yum whatprovides */system-config-printer replies:

    system-config-printer-1.4.1-21.el7.x86_64 : A printer administration tool Repo : base Matched from:
    Filename : /usr/bin/system-config-printer

    system-config-printer-libs-1.4.1-21.el7.noarch : Libraries and shared code for printer administration tool Repo : base Matched from:
    Filename : /usr/share/system-config-printer

    Again, I can’t help you with this. sorry.

    There is a ton of CUPS documentation, though, you may be able to find an answer there.

    Fred

  • I dont’t have any Brother printer to test ths but was the printer USB
    connected when you ran the setup? If so, one may be the network connection (the first entry) and the second one the same printer over USB?

  • Do you have CUPS autodiscover turned on? (AKA Avahi on Linux systems), if so CUPS will have automatically added the printer in addition to the one you manually added.

    Once again, do you have a 64 bit system? If so, then any executables in the RPMs won’t work unless you have added the 32-bit compatibility stuff. RPMs aren’t magic, they need to have the requirements added by the packager and if the requirements aren’t mentioned in the RPM, it will still install, but none of the executables will run. They will come up with Bad ELF errors.

    The god Google is not infallible.

    system-config-printer is the old way of adding and managing printers. It’s a GUI, but you can start it from a command line in a GUI
    environment (i.e. it’s not a command line program). But it’s just a front end, you still need the underlying drivers there before it can configure a printer.

    However, system-config-printer is deprecated in CentOS 7 and I believe it’s not in CentOS 8 (I could be wrong though). The official way to manage printers in CentOS 8 is either via CUPS or cockpit.

    P.

  • [Michael Hennebry]

    Ah. That makes sense.

    It must have found whatever it needed:
    Both queues work.

    Add printer worked after I added myself to the lp and sys groups. The cups_error file gave me something to search for.

    All good now.

  • I also have a Brother HL-L2360DW but am not happy with the print quality when I print PDF-documents. All text ends up “stippled” and hard to read when I print from the PDF-viewer in CentOS 7. Not sure what the problem is but given that a regular e-mail for instance prints fine, it would seem to have something to do with the PDF viewer, the printer driver or the printer when printing PDFs.

    Anyone else has the same problem? How do I research this?

  • I don’t have any specific guidance for you, but I can tell you what’s happening.

    The PDF document is being rasterized before being printed, and then some stage along the line is dithering the rasterized form to spread out the errors (aliasing) that occur when you rasterize vector art — which includes virtually all printed text!

    The fix therefore is to either:

    1. If printing to B&W, rasterize to the printer’s native resolution in 1-bit B&W, not to grayscale. If you rasterize to the wrong resolution, it has to be resized which usually creates grayscale, and if you rasterize to the right resolution but it’s antialiased, it still won’t print sharply.

    2. Send it through to the printer to be rasterized there instead. The most durable form is Postscript, but if you don’t have a Postscript capable printer, or if it’s just too slow on that mode, pick the right language.

    The trick is finding out which of the above failure modes is happening in your case. There’s probably 2-4 stages in the CentOS printing process where data is handed off from one process to another before it hits the actual printer, and they can all be doing these sorts of mistranslation.

    That’s why Postscript was such a great idea: the producing application wrote out the Postscript rendition of the doc, and it was just sent as unprocessed data until it hit the printer, no reinterpretation along the way.

  • I haven’t noticed any such problem (and as a former typographer I’m fairly picky about my type). Can you upload an image of the bad result somewhere?