# [solved] cups crashes brother HL4150CDN

## Vrenn

Hello dear printer experts.

I have a major Problem with cups. Printing a page (mostly a html-website, it doesn't matter witch browser I use) the Brother HL4150CDN gives a red "!", an "E1" error and demands to be shut off.

I once had this problem, solved by upgrading to cups 1.7.1.

Now it came back affecting all current cups-versions (1.7.1-r1 to 1.7.5).

I am out of ideas and desperate.

PS: I am using gienah's suggetion to use the ppd-file of the W7 driver as there are no wrapper-drivers for gentoo.

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## gienah

A while ago I had a problem where the Brother HL4150CDN would not print a pdf file

which appeared to have a page that output diagrams beyond the width of the page.

Specifying page ranges I could print the rest of the document other than the 1 page

it did not like.

I don't know if that is the problem you are seeing, but like I guess you have to

try something different, so one idea is to try saving the web page to a pdf file

using a web browser extension, something like (I have not used this):

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2023706/print-friendly-for-chrome-optimizes-web-pages-for-printing.html

Then to try printing the pdf file.

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## Vrenn

Good idea! I'm searching for the corresponding firefox-plugin.

But the truce is, that cups >1.6 (excluding 1.7.1) is broken, or cups--filters, or poppler...

I stumbled upon https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=89122

Brother seems not to use real PS-drivers, but a very fragile emulation-api.

I am stuck in this printer for a while.

right now I am updating libreoffice to unstable.

Libreoffice prints well I think, but by this I get ~amd64 poppler, worth a try  :Wink: 

Anyhow, as you suggest the print needs to be chewed for cups. Either a firefox-plugin, or a cups-relay on a NAS if I get one...

But it would be better if cups and brother could talk together eye to eye again  :Sad: 

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## charles17

 *Vrenn wrote:*   

> But it would be better if cups and brother could talk together eye to eye again 

 Does it print the testpage from http://localhost:631/printers/ where you need to select your printer and will find the Mantenance button with "Print Test Page"?

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## Vrenn

It does.

The error is mostly on html-pages, strangely.

Founding some bugs on the web, just for the record:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18711

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17952

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=412135

But that are just picks in the dark.

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## Vrenn

I'm not proud of of the way I found a workaround to print my web-pages with firefox (hunted the bug rather like a shaman believing in the ghosts of bitstream with herbs in the right and chicken in the left hand)

But I found a post about poppler and brother printers:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-2022997.html

Following commands work:

```
lpstat -v

lpadmin -p <printer> -o pdftops-renderer-default=gs
```

 (lpstat -v for the "printername")

The "I believe in the only true standard"-bug should be in the poppler-libs. Switching to ghostscript makes my printer working.

I hope this workaround will last for the next restart and updates. I tested only one (the 100%fail)-print, as only the next few weeks will show if the bug is gone.

Thanks for your advices, they are still options for me!

And thanks to Till Kamppeter and richpri (they describe how to undo these settings too!)

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