CUPS spool in devices with limited space

I was trying to print a large document, and it would never print. A small print job had no issues. To add to that I was printing a stupid PDF form that will only open with Acrobat Reader. The print job was passing through many places, VMWare guest, my notebook, and finally print server. I spent hours looking for what’s wrong.

Finally after many hours lost the issue was found to be lack of storage space in the print server; specifically print job spool was filling the disk.

I was unable to find a work around or a fix other than printing in smaller batches. I believe not many people come across this issue, IMHO this is not even worth fixing. I just blogged it for my own reference.

Installing Lexmark X1100 series on fc6

I unfortunately bought a Lexmark X1170 all in one two years back, it was cheap and got both printer and scanner. It worked fine on Windows. It was just paper weight ever since I moved to Linux.

I struck luck yesterday, when I stumbled upon a forum posting on Ubuntu forum.

So I started out straightaway, but had trouble getting the correct drivers from Lexmark site, as instructed in the forum (Got 404). So I went and searched in opendrivers.com and fortunately found it. To help all the poor soles to get the drivers easily I have hosted the rpms. If you download these rpms you can skip the part upto converting the rpms with alien if you are using a debian based system, or install the rpms and continue from restarting CUPS.

Here are the links:
http://www.mohanjith.net/downloads/d…1.0-1.i386.rpm
http://www.mohanjith.net/downloads/drivers/printers/lexmark/z600llpddk-2.0-1.i386.rpm

The instructions worked like a charm, and now I’m making use of my printer finally. From my point of view X1100 series is a repackage of Z600 series with a scanner.

Even though the scanner was correctly detected by SANE, I was unable to scan. But the version of sane that comes with Fedora Core 6 (Zod) is old.