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Old 20th November 2010
Mantazz Mantazz is offline
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Default FBSD 8.1, KDE4 Printing Woes

I am running KDE 4.4.5 on my FreeBSD 8.1-Release laptop. I cannot seem to print much of anything anymore, with CUPS running. The only thing I can print currently is a test page - and only through the CUPS utilities (at localhost:631).

Firefox (specifically linux-firefox) doesn't see *any* printers, it only gives me the option to print to file. This is frustrating but was not always a game-stopper as I could always take that file and open it in okular and print there ...

Except now okular sees printers but never sends jobs anywhere. I can open a PDF in there, and send it to a printer but the job never goes anywhere. It never shows up under sent or active jobs in CUPS, but it never gives an error, either. Okular seems to think everything is OK even though it clearly is not. I would try to print from acroread, but that program is a massive pile of failure on FBSD 8.1-Release (opens and immediately crashes) in my experience.

To make things more curious I found I can print from Kate, but that isn't helpful when I want to print a pdf.

When I googled for various connotations of "kde freebsd print" I got several references to "kprinter", which apparently no longer exists in this version of KDE.

Any ideas on what to do?
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Old 20th November 2010
Mantazz Mantazz is offline
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Default

I noticed something else odd here. I can print from Kate (the KDE text editor) just fine, but print jobs from Okular (the KDE PDF viewer) go nowhere. If I start Okular from the command line and try to print I get:
Code:
usage: lpr [-Pprinter] [-#num] [-C class] [-J job] [-T title] [-U user]
        [-Z daemon-options] [-i[numcols]] [-i[numcols]] [-1234 font]
        [-L locale] [-wnum] [-cdfghlnmprstv] [name ...]
When I send the print job. Which to me seems to indicate that Okular is using a bad syntax, but why Okular would be wrong when Kate is not is beyond me. I don't know where the print command options have been moved to in this new version of KDE, either...
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Old 21st November 2010
adamk adamk is offline
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Default

Checkout the handbook section on printing via cups:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO...ups/index.html

Specifically, getting all applications to prefer the cups utilities over the ones in the base system:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO...rts-knobs.html
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Old 25th November 2010
Mantazz Mantazz is offline
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Default Solved ... I think [LONG]

I have now made it far enough that I can print from Okular and Firefox. Acrobat in Wine opens PDFs and stays open, but doesn't print (it says "no pages selected" when I try to print). Acrobat running non-Wine crashes when I try to open a file.

So in short, I can open a PDF in Okular and print it, which is success. I can print from Firefox as well, which is useful (although I broke linux-firefox).

Looking back through my logs, this is the order I went:

Before doing any of this, I cvsup'ed my full ports tree.

First, I tried to reinstall acroread9. It either failed or made no difference, I don't remember now which.

Then I tried to build CUPS. This failed with some annoying error that I didn't write down. I figured maybe CUPS wasn't the source of my misery since some apps were working, so I tried another approach.

Then I tried to reinstall acroread8 (figuring perhaps a different version would be less of a failure). This didn't solve any problems either.

Having noticed that linux-firefox was never printing, I tried reinstalling it. This made no difference, I'm not sure if it was even a different version than what I already had.

Something along the way clued me in to try glib20. I did that to address the CUPS error (although it didn't solve it on its own).

Having been very frustrated at this point I thought I would try to address the Wine issue, so I rebuilt and reinstalled it. This didn't help anything yet that I have seen.

Something in the CUPS errors hinted that maybe gnutls would be worth trying, which I did next. It didn't resolve the CUPS building problem but it seemed like a good idea.

A little more googling and I found a suggestion to rebuild cups-samba, which seemed odd to me since I don't use any samba shares on my network, but I went ahead and tried it anyways. I then did cups-client immediately afterwards.

With those built, I was able to successfully build and install the latest version of cups-base. For some reason "make deinstall cups-base" did not actually remove the old version from my system completely (still shows up in "pkg_info -aE | grep cups-base") but things seem OK anyways.

After all this (and one or more reboots to address my own frustration) I found I was again able to print from Okular. As I mentioned acroread is still a hopeless pile of fail on my system, so I took another swing at it.

I found a thread here (and elsewhere) that suggested linux_base-fc10 is poinson to acroread9, so I uninstalled it and installed linux_base-fc4 instead. This didn't fix the acroread problem, and now linux-firefox doesn't work, either. I'll probably open a new thread for that, later.

At any rate, I at least was able to restore printing functionality for the most important applications.
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