Comment 32 for bug 959676

Daniel, it seems that your problem is different to the one of bug 987485. The main difference is that the problem of bug 987485 only occurs beginning with the second job after turning on the printer. The first job always prints well and so these users can use their printers turning off and turning on their printer for each job. The changes also improve the situation for that users, being able to print several jobs in a row.

Your problem is different. Just in the beginning no job came out at all for you. Under Windows it can be even the same problem, meaning that there is a hardware incompatibility between the Prolific adaptor and the ML-4500, but as it can also be a problem of the Windows driver being hard-coded to the first parallel port this is not sure. The Linux driver is for sure not locked down to the first parallel port. The driver which turns the data into the format needed by the printer and the backend which sends the data to the printer are separate and independent.

Can you please try the following workaround:

Remove the blacklisting of the usblp kernel module:

sudo mv /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-cups-usblp.conf ~
sudo modprobe usblp

If you get errors here the blacklisting is perhaps already removed. Check it via:

ls -l /dev/usb/lp*
sudo usb_printerid /dev/usb/lp0

Clear the print queue:

cancel -a

Turn off and turn on your printer again, unplug and re-plug the USB cable.

Create a new print queue running the following commands:

lpadmin -p test -E -v parallel:/dev/usb/lp0 -m foomatic-db-compressed-ppds:0/ppd/foomatic-ppd/Samsung-ML-4500-gdi.ppd
lpadmin -p test -o PageSize=A4

Try to print to this queue. Does it work?