[gentoo-user] Please help me get my printer working again.

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hi, Gentoo.

My printer used to work.  According to CUPS, its last succesful print
was in February.  (Incidentally, I used to have an up-to-date system, but
that went when I screwed it up after Gentoo made Gnome-3 stable and I
tried to switch out of Gnome.  My last emerge --sync was around the same
time.)

When I tried to print a *.pdf from evince, I got an error message saying
/path/to/foomatic-rip didn't exist.  (Sorry, I can't reproduce the exact
error message any more).  It would seem there has been a change from
foomatic filters to cups-filters (which I have installed) at some stage.

But I don't recall this change, and I can't find any docs about how to
configure printing to use cups-filters.  When I go through the "Modify
printer" sequence in http://localhost:631, and try to change the filter,
I just get presented with a long list of foomatic filters.

I've been at this stage for some while now, dreading the impending hours
and hours of web searching.  Any tips people can give me to cut this
miserable process short will be most warmly received.

By the way, what has happened to the helpful documentation which used to
be at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en?  Most of it seems to have
disappeared.  There used to be a helpful doc on setting up a printer,
but that has gone.  (I'm lucky enough to be able to read the German
translations, which (largely, at least) still exist, but they're
somewhat out of date).

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).