HP laserjet printers and RedHat 7.3

HP laserjet printers and RedHat 7.3

[Paul Furness]

Good morning.

Has anyone managed to get a HP Laserjet 4000 and 4050 to work from
RedHat linux 7.3's LPRng?

We have here a fairly old machine running the print queues (amongst
other things). It's running RH linux 6.2 (LPRng 3.6.12). and everything
is working fine. We have 4 printers: a Tektronix phaser850, an HP
LJ8150, an HP LJ4050 and an HP LJ4000.

I've build a replacement server. It's new hardware, and has RH7.3
installed (plus patches), and has LPRng 3.8.9.

Using redhat's configuration tools (printconf-gui and printconf-tui) I
create print queues for the printers and assign to them the appropriate
drivers (for example HP Laserjet 4050 - Postscript). The Tektronix and
the LJ8150 work perfectly - I can print to them from linux just fine,
and also from windows (using samba on the print server).

However, the 4000 series printers just don't want to work. I tried
different drivers (lj5gray for example) and all of them give different
but unacceptable problems: sometimes, plain text test pages are all
messed up or have lines missing. Sometimes, Postscript pages start fine
but then generate postscript errors half way through.

Windows clients are also having trouble - some drivers leave the output
scrambled, but most of them simply mean that nothing at all comes out of
the printer.

I tried a plain Postscript driver and even a raw print queue driver, but
nothing works for both linux and windows printing.

It looks fairly clearly like a driver problem, but I don't seem to have
a choice of drivers for these printers. 

Has anyone else found this problem and worked out a fix? (Don't tell me:
convert to cups. The trouble is, if I do that I can't print properly
from the older linux machines using lpd because it chops off some of the
text, and it does it on all the printers I have).

Any help greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Paul.