I had a HP Deskjet 840C working perfectly with CUPS running on a
stand-alone networked computer a while ago. I didn't use it for some
days, configured NFS and then tried to print something again, however
this time it didn't work anymore, CUPS says "media tray empty!" and if i
try to configure the printer it gives me the error:
"server-error-device-error". Does anyone know what that means? Is it
just a generic error? I can see the linux usb-system detects the printer
fine, i have tried removing and adding the printer a dozen times,
rebooted, removed NFS (disabled the rc-files) but nothing seems to help.
This machine does nothing at all except printing and is on a LAN,
nothing except setting up NFS was done, any ideas? Also, the printer
itself works fine, tested with a windows machine, nothing wrong.

pango wrote:
> I had a HP Deskjet 840C working perfectly with CUPS running on a
> stand-alone networked computer a while ago. I didn't use it for some
> days, configured NFS and then tried to print something again, however
> this time it didn't work anymore, CUPS says "media tray empty!" and if i
> try to configure the printer it gives me the error:
> "server-error-device-error". Does anyone know what that means? Is it
> just a generic error? I can see the linux usb-system detects the printer
> fine, i have tried removing and adding the printer a dozen times,
> rebooted, removed NFS (disabled the rc-files) but nothing seems to help.
> This machine does nothing at all except printing and is on a LAN,
> nothing except setting up NFS was done, any ideas? Also, the printer
> itself works fine, tested with a windows machine, nothing wrong.

I just was able to solve a CUPS problem by using the debug log. You
probably already know how to do this, but just in case:

<< Edit /etc/cups/cupsd.conf (or wherever this configuration file is
installed in your case) to have the line "LogLevel debug" there. Then
restart your CUPS daemon ["/etc/rc.d/rc.cups start" for slackware]...

Now print a job. Watch what is written to your CUPS error log. It
normally sits in /var/log/cups/error_log. In debug level, nearly every
action of the CUPS daemon is logged. You can see which filters and
backends are called in which order. Very often you'll get a hint about
what is missing for the print job to succeed. >>

(from
http://www.linuxprinting.org/kpfeifl...cups-help.html)

In my case the log asked me if ESP Ghostscript was installed. In fact,
it was, but it must have been corrupted, because after uninstalling and
reinstalling the ESP Ghostscript package for Slack, my printer's working
fine. This was after a half a day turning the cups daemon on and off,
uninstalling and reinstalling gimp-print, uninstalling and reinstalling
my printer both with the browser interface and with KDE's print utility,
etc., etc.