[CLUE-Tech] My new printer hates me, too

[Matt Gushee]

Hi, all--

Here I am with another printer problem. Some of you may recall my very
frustrated post a couple weeks ago about my cheapo Xerox inkjet going
nuts. Well, I finally got fed up and picked up an old HP Laserjet IID
for $49 and ...

    ... it works fine under WinNT 4.0 (dual-booting on my Linux box)
    and Win98 (wife's 'puter).

    Under Linux PS print jobs come out as ... I want to say garbage,
    but I don't mean garbage characters, I mean pixel noise.
    At best you can make out the shapes of letters, but all the
    characters are surrounded and partly or wholly obscured by random
    dots.

I've examined /etc/printcap and, to the extent I understand printcap,
it looks fine. I have tried switching between the magicfilter and
apsfilter packages; apsfilter works better, but the output is still
unacceptable by any stretch of the imagination.

Other possibly relevant info:

    Linux: Debian GNU/Linux 2.2
    lpr:   vanilla BSD lpr, v1.0.48 (?)
    Ghostscript: Aladdin 5.50

    Printer: HP LaserJet IID, 4.6 MB of memory, PCL (i.e. non-PS)
    
    Port:    /dev/lp0 io=0x378, irq=5 (could this be part of the
	     problem?) 

I would appreciate any suggestions.

Matt