CUPS suddenly stopped (and stopping printers)

[marek_online]

Hi,

I realise, after spending the last while rooting through Google, that CUPS is a bit of a thorny issue for Dapper, but I thought I'd post anyway, so see if someone can give me a few pointers.

I upgraded to Dapper after its official release a few weeks ago, and since then printing has generally been fine, both to my own printer (HP PSC1215) at home and network printing (over a Windows network) at work.

Printed fine to my home printer on Thursday morning, and had to go away for a couple of days. Switch on the computer and printer today, and nothing doing.

The printer at home is a CUPS printer from a server running Mandriva (I've not bothered to upgrade it so far, as it's pretty much just my proxy and print server). My laptop (which is what is running Kubuntu Dapper) can see the CUPS printer and can print a test page for it, but will print no other jobs.

There are two instances of the same printer - one there because I've enable cups browsing, and another installed locally. The browsed version just vanishes jobs - they never appear on its queue. The installed locally version processes the job, but as soon as it changes from "Processing" to "Queued", the printer stops, and if I try to start it, it only starts for a couple of seconds before stopping again, for no apparent reason.

The same problems occur if I remove the installed locally version, or if I disable cups browsing.

Printing's pretty important for me, so this is a rather serious problem. I've reinstalled cups, changed SystemGroup in cupsd.conf to include root and sys and removed and re-added the printer several times, all to no avail.

Any pointers are greatly appreciated.

[marek_online]

Re: CUPS suddenly stopped (and stopping printers)

Okay, so some more extensive testing was in order.

It turns out that printing from OpenOffice worked fine, and also from Firefox, suggesting that kprinter might have been the problem, rather than CUPS.

I read somewhere earlier that KDE 3.5.3 fixed some problems with the interaction between 3.5.2 and CUPS 1.2, so I upgraded.

Printing is now sorted with cups browsing. A locally installed version of the same remote printer still gives the "stopping when queuing" problem, but as the thing will at least print through the browsed instance, this isn't a problem, just odd.