Ubuntu 9.04 upgrade breaks printers.

Well, it broke one of mine.

I have the mighty Epson ALCX11NF set up as my network printer. It's a totally awesome small workgroup printer with a capacity of 45000 pages per month. I think I only read that much because I sure as heck don't print that much. It scans, photocopies and faxes too. It's sure a lot of machine for the money.

I still have a little Epson Stylus Photo R210 for when I need to print photographic quality images and one off CD and DVDs, etc. It's working faultlessly after the upgrade.

Getting the printer installed in the first place isn't plug and pray, as Windoze users are accustomed to and Ubuntu users are becoming accustomed to. There is a little tweaking involved because it uses a filter shell script to take output from your application and feed it to the printer. OK - that's an oversimplification, but it will do for the purposes of this article.

First off, here's how to install the printer:
* Go over to http://www.gedda.info/?p=132 and read what has been done before. It's VERY straight forward.
* However, scroll down to Frank's comment on November 6, 2008 and Virgil's comment on November 7. Frank gets it almost right. So does Virgil. The solution of copying the contents of /usr/local/bin to /usr/lib/cups/filters works, but it's not elegant. If you make symbolic links, that would be a far better solution. The choice is up to you.


And here's how to fix the broken install when you upgrade to Jaunty:
* When you try to print, you will get an error and the Printing Troubleshooter will pop up and help you.
* The Printing Troubleshooter tells you that "Missing Printer Driver"... etc... etc... "requires the pstoalcx11.sh program". Bingo!
* First, check that pstoalcx11.sh is in /usr/local/bin and that permissions are set to read and execute for all users and groups. If it's not there, go back to the install procedure above.
* Next, try sudo aa-complain cupsd in case you overwrote the config file during the upgrade. Restart cups (sudo /etc/init.d/cups restart) and try again.
* Drumroll - fanfare - high fives all around - it should be working now.


Come to think of it, this fault is likely to occur on any upgrade where the aa-complain config files are overwritten during an upgrade. Bookmark this page so that you have it to hand when the next Ubuntu distro comes out in only six months.