Solve Firefox 3.6 and Thermal Printer Problems
By admin | June 15, 2010
Recently I upgraded my Kubuntu 8.10 to 10.04 on my laptop, all went well and until 2 days ago I tried to print Fedex shipping label to a UPS LP2844 thermal printer. Because I upgraded my laptop at weekend, so I didn’t test the label printing thingy until the following Monday morning. Everything looked normal and I just went ahead to prepare shipping labels, then I hit the print button, nothing happened! I went to the cups error log, found this “Print file was not accepted (Unsupported format ‘text/html’!)!”, it was all OK before the upgrade, so I suspected the upgrade might be blamed, so I went ahead to downgrade cups and related packages, that was a messy process, but I managed to finish the downgrade and when I tested the label printing, it was still no go.
Then I went to the print server, added “*cupsFilter text/html 0 textonly” to textonly.ppd and tried to print the thermal label again, the file was accepted but noting came out of the thermal printer, I was baffled, how come I downgraded cups it still didn’t work? Now the only things affected the label printing is the browser and the print server, cups, so the cups was cleared of being guilty, I upgraded cups back to latest version, which is 1.4.3, along with all related packages, of course the problem was still there, then one thing occurred to me, that the Fedex thermal label print needs java plug in, and I was running jre 1.6.0-12, and the latest version as of right now is 1.6.0-20, I upgraded the jre and the linked the new plug in, the label printing worked again!
Now I don’t know it was Fedex upgraded their system or firefox upgrade had screwed the old java plugin, anyway the problem is solved and I am a happy camper again!
