FC5 vs cups vs Epson C82 printer

[Gene Heskett]

Greetings;

3 or 4 questions actually.  New install, whatdidjaexpect? :)

After getting a boot to work on FC5, I switched the inittab to 3 for my 
next bootup, (and no one has told me what to change to make it use KDE 
yet when I type startx from a runlevel 3 login, and I have asked here 
twice already) but while I was there I tried to setup my printer which 
works flawlessly here using FC2 but with tarball builds of cups, kde, 
gimp, sane, gutenprint, (yadda) replacing the rpm packages.

Is it as simple as a 'yum install switchdesk'?

I did see it install foomatic, but don't recall seeing either gimp-print 
or gutenprint go by.  But seeing as how it did install foomatic, I 
figured that when I sent a browser to localhost:631, I'd have my choice 
of hundreds of drivers in all languages for my printer.

Imagine my surprise when the espon menu showed me only about 10 
potential drivers, none of which seem to be capable of driving my C82.
I did try one, and sent a test page, but stopped it 30 minutes later 
(this in 360x360 dpi mode mind you, which should have been a 10 second 
job) when the printer, after laboring mightily all this time, had only 
manage to feed about 1.5" of paper.  On ejecting the page, the ink was 
good and black, but had not soaked thru the paper as I would have 
expected.  It was also in a very coarse dpi on the paper, and the top 
of the cups test pages color wheel was black only.

So at this point I'm assuming something isn't configured right by the 
foomatic install else I'd have had my choice of drivers well covered.

So what sort of a magic twanger do I need to find?

Comment: On this FC2 box, I removed foomatic years ago, reconfigured and 
rebuilt cups to use the gimp-print drivers, and brought my C82's output 
up to the equivalent of that of a chemical darkroom, something I also 
have no little experience with over the last 60 years.  Do I have to 
similarly "break" the FC5 install by doing it again just to make it 
work, or is this a known issue with a fix readily available?

Also, I just now tried to boot my 2.6.16.1 kernel, running right now, 
but when it gets to the initial console it reports it cannot open it 
and hangs till you give it the vulcan nerve pinch & reboot.  Hints on 
that would be appreciated.

And, how do I fix X so that when I type startx, kde comes up?  I've had 
no luck getting gnomes evolution to fetch mail, the correct password 
isn't correct.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
People having trouble with vz bouncing email to me should add the word
'online' between the 'verizon', and the dot which bypasses vz's
stupid bounce rules.  I do use spamassassin too. :-)
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Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.