[Wine] Printing problem

Spudley wineforum-user at winehq.org
Mon Sep 7 09:57:14 CDT 2009


Hi all.

I have a very old address book application (Win95 vintage?). My wife has been using it for a long time to manage her contacts list.

She likes it because it is designed to print pages formatted for her filofax-type organizer -- she has some pre-perforated stationary which gives four organizer pages per A4 sheet, and the application is designed to print directly onto this paper.

We've had the software installed under Wine for about two years, and at first it worked beautifully.

However the last time she tried to print with it, she found she couldn't.  The application simply reports "The selected operation is not supported on this printer". Which is odd, because it's not trying to do anything even remotely unusual.

The message appears to be generated within the application; no Wine errors are produced on the console.

She doesn't need to print very often so a lot has changed since it last printed successfully. Ubuntu has gone from 7.10 to 9.04; Wine has gone from 1.0 to 1.1.29.

Downgrading her Ubuntu isn't an option, but I have tried downgrading Wine (down as far as 1.1.13) without any success. And I've tried it on several other PCs with varying combinations of OS and Wine versions, always with the same results.

I even get the same error message if I try printing to a PDF.


My guess is that the app is checking the printer settings via a Windows API call, and is not getting the response it expects.

Something has clearly changed somewhere along the line. It might be that Wine is reporting printer details slightly differently to how it used to? Or possibly something in Linux has changed? I'm not getting any debug messages, so it's hard to tell.

If you need to know, the application in question was provided by Succes, a company that makes the Organizer and stationary that my wife uses.  But they no longer support the software.

Any assistance to help me get the app working again would be greatly appreciated.


I'm sure the Wine folk here will want to find out what's going on and work out how to fix it, which would be great.  But I'm pragmatic; I'm quite willing to consider alternatives. So if anyone can suggest an alternative (free) app that will print to the required format, please let me know. (I've also tried searching for an OpenOffice template for the stationary, but haven't found anything suitable)







More information about the wine-users mailing list