CUPS Printing Failure in 12.1

English Hardware
#1

I’m using OpenSUSE 12.1 on i686. All available updates have been applied.

I have an HP Laserjet 4/4M attached to lpt1. parport, parport_pc,ppdev, and lp modules are loaded. Initially, things weren’t working because the lp module wasn’t getting loaded. I am now forcing the lp module to load.

/dev/lp0 exists. I can send text to /dev/lp0 and it comes out of the printer.

I have configured the printer to use “HP LaserJet 4/4M with driver HP LaserJet 4 Plus - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.6”

Accessing the CUPS web interface shows the printer: “hp (Idle, Accepting Jobs, Shared, Server Default)”

If I use the web interface to print a test page, the job is submitted. Clicking on the job shows the state as:

processing since
Tue 10 Jan 2012 10:21:42 AM MST
“Unable to open print file: No such file or directory”

ls -ald /var/spool/cups
drwx–x— 3 root lp 12288 Jan 10 10:22 /var/spool/cups/

reddwarf:/var/spool/cups # ls -al /var/spool/cups/
total 28
drwx–x— 3 root lp 12288 Jan 10 10:22 .
drwxr-xr-x 18 root root 4096 Jan 3 20:02 …
-rw------- 1 root lp 771 Jan 10 10:22 c00453
-rw-r----- 1 root lp 273 Jan 10 10:21 d00453-001
drwxrwx–T 2 root lp 4096 Jan 2 19:22 tmp

I attempted to change the permissions on the directories, but the permissions are reset each time cups restarts. I examined /var/log/cups/*, but there is no useful information there.

This is really frustrating that the most basic printer possible just doesn’t work out of the box. I had to work with this a lot under 11.4 to get it to work.

I would really appreciate any ideas on how to get printing working under 12.1

#2

  1. Can you post your /etc/cups/printers.conf? (I’m wondering if your queue is not configured correctly, as you mentioned /dev/lp0 and maybe the URI is pointing to /dev/parport0 instead).

  2. Was this working with a prior version of openSUSE?

  3. Do you have the optional PostScript module fitted to this printer? (This would give you the option to print directly without using a gutenprint driver)

#3

After playing with this, it appears the DeviceURI is wrong. Changing the DeviceURI to parallel:/dev/lp0 works.

Why, why, why, if the device is wrong could it have not said “Invalid Device URI”? What a poor piece of code if it can’t even report the most basic of errors. Four freaking hours lost because it couldn’t say:

“Unable to open print file (parallel://dev/lp1/) : No such file or directory”

Instead it just says:

“Unable to open print file: No such file or directory”

What file? Where?

Which brings up another issue. Why did 12.1 stop loading the lp module? If it hadn’t been for that, I wouldn’t have even screwed up the configuration in printers.conf

Printer configuration file for CUPS v1.5.0

Written by cupsd on 2012-01-02 19:00

DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE WHEN CUPSD IS RUNNING

<DefaultPrinter hp>
UUID urn:uuid:c1f9b79f-7588-37b0-79a3-e1a6650717cb
Info HP LaserJet 4/4M with driver HP LaserJet 4 Plus - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.6
MakeModel HP LaserJet 4 Plus - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.7
DeviceURI parallel://dev/lp0
State Idle
StateTime 1320170737
Type 8392724
Accepting Yes
Shared Yes
JobSheets none none
QuotaPeriod 0
PageLimit 0
KLimit 0
OpPolicy default
ErrorPolicy stop-printer
</Printer>
~

#4

After playing with this, it appears the DeviceURI is wrong. Changing the DeviceURI to parallel:/dev/lp0 works.

As I suspected. :slight_smile:

Which brings up another issue. Why did 12.1 stop loading the lp module? If it hadn’t been for that, I wouldn’t have even screwed up the configuration in printers.conf

This hasn’t been the case for the past couple of versions AFAIR, and is generally well known.

A bug report was filed, but its not really considered a bug as such:

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=673845

I guess the parallel port is considered a legacy port (with only a small number of users still using parallel-connected equipment), so not considered necessary to load automatically (although still supported by the kernel).

#5

Why, why, why, if the device is wrong could it have not said “Invalid Device URI”? What a poor piece of code if it can’t even report the most basic of errors. Four freaking hours lost because it couldn’t say:

“Unable to open print file (parallel://dev/lp1/) : No such file or directory”

Instead it just says:

“Unable to open print file: No such file or directory”

You’d need to take that up with the CUPS developers. It is not an issue specific to openSUSE.

#6

On 2012-01-10 20:36, gsexton wrote:

> Why, why, why, if the device is wrong could it have not said “Invalid
> Device URI”? What a poor piece of code if it can’t even report the most
> basic of errors. Four freaking hours lost because it couldn’t say:

Well, you should report that bug in Bugzilla.

> Which brings up another issue. Why did 12.1 stop loading the lp module?
> If it hadn’t been for that, I wouldn’t have even screwed up the
> configuration in printers.conf

It wasn’t 12.1, I have seen that problem in 11.4 if not earlier. I assume
the devs thought that almost nobody now uses a parallel port, so we do not
need to load it on most systems by default. Instead, few those that need it
must load it manually.

Makes sense.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)

#7

I filed this as a bug on CUPS.

#8

Hello people,

I just had the exactly same error message but in my case I’m not using a parallel port, I’m using a usb port with a Canon mp160 printer.

I’m on 12.1 32 bit

Unable to open print file - : no such file or directory

which file ? And why a nonexistent file is passed to lp ?

What should I do ?
Thanks

#9

Ok, my user was not in the lp group. Sorry