Hello:

Yes, that is one way.

But you can forego the hplip part by installing CUPS and adding the local printer via the UI.
If the printer is connected (parallel, serial, USB), the system will see it and as a result, CUPS will find it.

To finish you only need to provide it with the printer's *.ppd file, at least that is how I recall having done it at the time. 

As I mentioned in the OP, at some point in the future CUPS will no longer use *.ppd files.
It is not clear when that will happen but it has been talked about since 2021.
As a result of this change, it would seem that whatever printer you have installed will either work as usual or need some application from the OEM to work.

I do not expect Samsung/HP to provide any such thing.

It is still not clear to me if the M2020W will work or I will need to pin CUPS at the last working version which is why I asked.

Thanks for your input.

Best,

A.

Hello:

Quite possibly (?) the correct firmware is missing/not being loaded.
Seems that hardware has a few issues:

See: https://forums.opensuse.org/t/gobi2000- … swer/71270

If that does not work, check these other posts:

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=202158
https://forums.centos.org/viewtopic.php?t=50599

One of them may be a lead to a solution, HTH.

Best,

A.

Hello:

But I did, I did !!!  8^)

This page has a section for the Debian 12 "Bookworm" Nvidia driver Version 525.105.17.

Consequently, that same section has a link to an Nvidia webpage labelled Appendix A. Supported NVIDIA GPU Products, this list being basically divided in two important parts:

The first part is the list of current NVIDIA GPUs supported in the unified driver and the second part is the list of all the legacy NVIDIA GPUs which are no longer supported in the unified driver.

The second part is in turn divided into separate sections, according the the different unified driver versions and their supported GPUs.

If you open that page in your browser and search for Quadro FX 580 or for the card's PCI_ID, 0659, you will only find it under the heading that reads "The 340.xx driver supports the following set of GPUs:"

The 340.xx driver supports the following set of GPUs:

NVIDIA GPU product    Device PCI ID* VDPAU features
GeForce 8800 GTX 	  0191 	           -
--- snip ---
Quadro FX 580 	          0659 	           A      ###
--- snip ---
NVS 300 	          10D8 	           C

Of course, shit happens all the time.

But the link is to an official Nvidia web page.
They most probably got it right.

Thanks for your efforts to help.

Best,

A.

Hello:

Not really ...

There are a set of deprecated entries which will prevent picom from starting when you test it from the terminal, but there is a warning to that effect with instructions.

Installing picom gets you a /usr/share/doc/picom/examples/picom.sample.conf file that has to be copied to ~/.config/picom/picom.conf after creating the destination directory.

I have purged compton and installed picom with no ill effects.
And after editing the *.conf file to get rid of all the shadows, fading, partial opacity, bluring and such I now have a snappy Linux desktop.

There is still the matter of some slight tearing which did not ocurr with the Nvidia drivers, but they are in the past now.
I'll have to make do with what is available, there may be some xorg.conf magic to be done as nouveau does not seem to use one by default.

Best,

A.

Hello:

A necessary heads up.

It would seem that compton itself, although it has not been explicitly archived by the maintainer, would be at least in a pre-archived state as (apparently) they have had no activity there for the past five years.
ie: there are unassigned issues from as far back as 2019 with no input from them.

[rant]
Would it be too hard to at least say: "ain't doing no mo' maintaining, bitch!"
But in a timely fashion ...
[/rant]

An unanswered post post from 01/2022:

This would clarify the status of the compton package with picom packages available for Ceres, Daedalus and Chimaera.

From what I have read, a working compton.conf file would work also with picom, but we'll have to see about that.

Best,

A.

Hello:

Well ...
There seems to be (and evidently still is) some sort of problem with Xfce+compton.

Previous versions of Xfce (4.10-4.16) had a problem if compton was installed/enabled: Firefox, Thunar (and other desktop applications) would crash if you tried to drag something with the mouse pointer. eg: move around shortcuts within menus in FF, drag folders in Thunar.

Being a common issue to both applications, it was obviously not a FF or Thunar issue so I posted a question to the forum in 2018 and again in 2021.

I also posted a bug.

The questions to the forum never got a reply and the bug report got one stating that it was an Nvidia/compton/unsupported Xfce 4.10 problem, to try with  4.12 ...

The same problem persisted till Xfce 4.18 when it got "solved" by adding a native compositor.
A compositor which does not work properly.

So ...
Where is the problem?

Moot point now.
Disabling the Xfce native compositor and installing compton seems to be what is needed.

Best,

A.

Hello:

Yes, I don't like it so I don't use it much, but it works.

This on an Asus 1000HE running Devuan Beowulf on a backported kernel:

~$ uname -a
Linux eee-dev 5.10.0-0.deb10.16-686-pae #1 SMP Debian 5.10.127-2-bpo10+1 (2022-07-28) i686 GNU/Linux

My dmesg printout says this:

~$ sudo dmesg | grep -i serio1
3 --- snip ---
4 [    6.186975] psmouse serio1: elantech: assuming hardware version 2 (with firmware version 0x020030)
5 [    6.285227] psmouse serio1: elantech: Synaptics capabilities query result 0x00, 0x02, 0x64.
6 [    6.371781] psmouse serio1: elantech: Elan sample query result 00, 03, 64
7 [    6.595103] input: ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad as /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input2
8 --- snip ---

Run sudo dmesg | grep -i synaptics, sudo dmesg | grep -i elantech and see what you get in the printout.

You may also want to consider posting (some?) information about the hardware and Devuan release you are using so that you can get more help.

Best,

A.

Hello:

I beg to differ, it would not be right.

There is absolutely no need for that, please don't remove/delete anything.

We were simply exchanging opinions in a civilised manner, albeit drifing off topic.
Nothing nothing more / nothing less.

At worse, agreeing to disagree.  8^)

I do apologise if my tone/wording made you think otherwise.

Best,

A.

Hello:

I see that the CUPS package is maintained by the 'Debian Printing Team'.

This issue with (what seems to be) a dependency problem with libcupsimage2 ...
Who would have to take care of it? ie: CUPS, Debian, Devuan?

My uneducated guess would be that package dependencies are something that involves the developers.
ie: the list of dependencies is generated somewhere along the line and added to the source code so that when the package is compiled and 'made' by maintainers, the binary will install them all with the proper versions.
ie: maintainers would not add dependencies on their own.

Is this correct?
If not, who would have to take care of the problem with libcupsimage2?

~$ aptitude why libcupsimage2
i   cups                 Suggests   foomatic-db-compressed-ppds | foomatic-db
p   foomatic-db          Recommends printer-driver-all                       
p   printer-driver-all   Recommends printer-driver-splix                     
p   printer-driver-splix Depends    libcupsimage2 (>= 1.4.0)                 
~$ 

From what I can make of the above aptitude printout, cups suggests foomatic-db / foomatic-db-compressed-ppds which in turn recommends printer-driver-all.

In turn, printer-driver-all recommends printer-driver-splix but this last package depends on libcupsimage2.

Now, my system does not have the suggested packages foomatic-db-compressed-ppds / foomatic-db installed because I do not install suggested packages because of their suggested nature.
ie: they are not dependencies.

But this being so ended screwing up my printing because the cups-filters package will fail if the libcupsimage2 is not installed.

It seems that cups-filters depends on libcupsimage2 being present to work properly.
But there is no mention of that here.

I'd appreciate some input on this.

Thanks in advance.

Best,

A.