You shouldn't be too surprised after you insisted to stick with such an old distro. Printing to anything other than a natively Postscript-capable device has always been just short of a nightmare on traditional Unix systems. I understand that this is an area where huge strides have been made in the recent past, though I'm not sure where things stand now. But they can only be better than in a several years old distro.

Makeshifts last the longest.