Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

Printing under Fedora Core has been a mixed bag. The most recent installment of non-stop 360^° fun was when I discovered all my printers had stopped working on my newish install of FC5. A bit of probing discovered that all the backend drivers that are supposed to be in /usr/lib64/cups/backend/ that actually do something - usb, socket (for JetDirect printers), half a dozen others - have just magically disappeared.

I do a bit of experimenting. yum whatprovides /var/lib64/cups/backend/usb says that the cups package from the base repository provides them, but it's not installed. I download it, remove the old package with rpm -ev --nodeps cups and then rpm -ivh --nodeps --oldpackage cups-1.1.23-30.2.x86_64.rpm to install the base package. Goodie, all the backend drivers are back, but ugh, cupsd now fails with client error 127, whatever the hell that means. yum upgrade upgrades cups, which then gleefully (I swear I heard the words "A working cups installation! Let's adger it thoroughly with pitchforks!" coming from the motherboard...) removed all the backend drivers again.

And no-one on #fedora seems able to help me. I'm up to begging for help on the blogosphere / lazyweb.

(Maybe it's an x86_64 thing - my test i386 machine seems to have both the old package and the backend drivers. But that still doesn't help me ...)