While Steve Jobs was extolling the merits of thin laptops (I prefer small to thin, but tastes differ), I was in the depths of /var/log fixing a print issue with a friend’s Mac Mini and her LexMark printer.

It was almost the same issue as described here by Ted Landau, though I got there a bit quicker thanks in part to his post. Symptom: you hit print, but get a printer stopped message. You can restart the print job but it immediately stops again.

It wasn’t obvious what was wrong, especially as the printer passed all its self-tests including printing its test page. There were no clues in the OS X GUI. The USB cable was OK.

I was helped by familiarity with other Unix-like operating systems. The first thing to look for is an error log, and in this case there was one sensibly located at /var/log/cups. It told me that a cartridge change had been detected and the new cartridge was not yet aligned, a condition that the driver treated as a fatal error. At this point the user confessed that the black cartridge was new, and that the printer had not worked since. However, she had run the alignment utility, several times in fact. Getting warm.

In Landau’s case, there was old ink in the cartridge bay preventing a good connection. In my case, the cartridge itself was faulty; a replacement worked fine. The deceptive aspect is that the cartridge had ink and could print; it just could not register its alignment for some reason.

Landau has a little rant about this:

Neither Lexmark’s nor Apple’s software were able to get the relevant error message to pop up anywhere where a user would be likely to see it. Having no message at all in the Printer Queue and having the key message buried in a cups log file is not the ideal situation.

His underlying point is correct. The cuddly GUI hides huge complexity. Windows is the same of course.

The point I will make is that both operating systems do a poor job of surfacing error logs. In Windows most logs are accessible through the Event Viewer GUI, but only advanced users find this. When a hard drive fails, you sometimes find that the event log (presuming you recover it sufficiently to read it) has been reporting bad blocks for ages, but the user was unaware.

In this case I suspect the real issue is Lexmark’s poor driver, which could have reported this problem in a sane manner.

How did we fix computers pre-Google?