Printing stopped working after cups-1.3.10 [Solved]

Akkara · Last edited by Akkara on Sat Aug 08, 2009 10:51 am; edited 1 time in total

Hi!

Today I find out that I can't print. The job sits in the queue but the printer never does anything about it. It is a network printer (Samsung ML-2551N Postscript), and was working well the last time I used it. Others can still print to it from their computer (Fedora), it is just me having the problem.

lpstat -t says something about 'Filter "foomatic-rip" for printer "Printit" not available: No such file or directory', which sounds like it may have something to do with it. Googling for that, I found a suggestion to delete and re-add the printer. However when I try to do this, I get "Unable to find the PostScript driver" in KDE's "Add Printer Wizard", and am unable to complete re-adding it.

It sounds like something messed up with one or more of my packages but I'm not sure where to look.

I don't print often so it isn't clear exactly when this problem started. There were quite a few system updates lately, and one of them might be the cause of this. The system changes since the last time I printed include:
- Finally moving to xorg 1.5 (had some time-sensitive projects due and didn't want to risk system instability)
- Updating to Kde 3.5.10 (which involved moving from monolithic to split builds)
- updating to gentoo-sources-2.6.29, from 2.6.26
- General miscellaneous updates
- Running a emerge -depclean

Everything else that I've used works well. Just printing went all kaplooey.

Thanks for any assistance you can provide!

comprookie2000 · Posted: Fri Jul 31, 2009 11:59 pm Post subject:

I had to change;

Akkara · Posted: Sat Aug 08, 2009 10:27 am Post subject:

Thanks for the reply!

I had tried the fix suggested (as well as the ones in the bug report), but it didn't do anything.

Re-emerging cups seemed to help however. Or perhaps it was the reboot. (Although, if I remember right, I had restarted cups previously anyway.)

Now I can get to the printer control-panel (kde 3.10 control-center -> Peripherals -> Printer) and select "add printer". I give it the address (a static in the 192.168 block, which I've tested separately by pointing firefox there to bring up the printer control page).

The "add-printer" control advances to the next panel, but there is only a very short list of manufacturers to choose from. (Previous to the updates, there was a much longer list.) The printer's manufacturer (Samsung, model ML-2551N) is not on this list.

Clicking on "Other..." brings up a file browser pointing to my home directory. I don't know where in the filesystem to navigate to find a file that's useful to it.

I cancel that and try randomly picking a HP printer, pretending my printer is a HP. I try 'print test page' and that works. But I'd like to set up the manufacturer and model correctly, as it had been.

Also, if I try checking the 'Postscript printer' box, it comes up with "Postscript driver not found". It seems like might have somehow I lost a bunch of drivers or something. Perhaps some flag(s) are set incorrectly?

Akkara · Posted: Sat Aug 08, 2009 10:50 am Post subject:

Solved it.

Went carefully through http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/printing-howto.xml , checking every flag. Somehow the 'ppds' USE-flag had gotten turned off (or perhaps it was a new flag?). I hadn't noticed that drivers aren't built unless asked for. They used to be there as far as I remember.

USE=ppds emerge -av1 cups fixed it. (and then added ppds to package.use).

Edit / addendum: Now that I know what was missing (namely net-print/foomatic-db-ppds and net-print/foomatic-filters-ppds, dependencies of cups when ppds is set), I was able to re-create what had happened. Apparently, ppds had been unset for some time, but I didn't notice or know the implication of this. Then the recent emerge --depclean got rid of the drivers that had been installed when ppds was last set, and printing stopped working.