NEMESIS MET

The ride had been smooth for a long time now.
But, with the Canon LBP 2900 Laser printer, I have hit a wall.

In their defence, Canon does offer a driver (2, infact, for the deb and rpm based distros), and an elaborate installation manual. One glaring omission in the manual is the absence of a troubleshooting section. Probably they are not believers of Murphy's law, or they did not bother.

The present installation being Opensuse 10.3, I first tried getting the printer to work in it. The detection and installation proceed without any errors, but the printer just wont print. It will even accept jobs, and the printer manager will show a processing status. Nothing else. I looked high and low for a solution. The few reported cases that I did come across, all ended without any success. Of particular interest is this interaction at linuxquestions.org Baig, eventually, did find success with Centos as reported at Unixmen. Unixmen was the other place where success was reported, but not as far as Opensuse was concerned.

Thinking Fedora will prove luckier, I tried a live Fedora 8 installation. Same fate.

Finally, after searching for the "dependencies" that unixmen had pointed out (at rpmfind), I found that only mandriva repository had those rpms. Opensuse and Fedora did not have the rpms even there. In anycase I doubt if the dependencies are really so. Because, with a Mandriva 2007 live CD, I can get the Printer to work. The only dependency that did cause a momentary hiccup was libstdc++.

It is a tough decision, whether to switch entirely to Mandriva or keep it as a "printing' installation and dual booting. IN the course of the installation, reinstallation, I have found the application management of Mandriva to be quite faster than Opensuse. Opensuse, I think, takes time reading through the entire repository list before loading the windows, whereas Mandriva doesn't. this saves atleast 20-30 seconds everytime. Besides double clicking on an rpm directly installs the package, without the kind of repository modification that is needed in OPensuse.

The jury is out.