except we got 5 of these at work and they all work fine, whether they're connected to windows boxes and shared over the network or directly connected to GNU/Linux boxes.

this is on Mandrake 10.1, but I do remember that earlier versions where a bit of a problem, so since you're using a very old distro (redhat 9 is no longer supported by redhat and recieves no updates afaik) your problem may be old CUPS version.

try to upgrade CUPS or upgrade the whole distro and see.

you may want to test with a recent liveCD first.

cheers,
Alaa

http://www.manalaa.net "i`m feeling for the 2nd time like alice in wonderland reading el wafd"

You have to set up CUPS on your RH9 box first to match your printer

what driver are you using ( I assume run redhat-config-printer to check it )

The only way I can -reliably- print without doing a lot of playing around is to convert my file to a postscript and use lpd

it's the most reliable way to print is by converting your file to postscript (.ps). If it is an image gimp can convert it and if it's a document you can save as a .pdf in open office and use the shell program pdf2ps to convert to a .ps

Then you use:

lpd -d file.ps

But that is assuming you've got the printer installed ( And since you get the first-line-garbage thing, you probably do )

I used to be indecisive .. but now I'm not so sure

Thanks, It's working Now
But what does Alaa mean by "you're using a very old distro" ?