CUPS printing not working on MandrivaOne 2008.0

Posted November 16th, 2007 in Linux/Unix/BSD

I sell Linux on my Linux CD Mall website and one of my customers emailed me today with a problem he was having trying to use printers with the 32 bit Live Gnome CD version of MandrivaOne 2008.0. For some reason he was getting error messages when he tried to add a printer. I thought that possibly this was an issue with not being able to print from a live CD so thought I'd check it out and see if the problem would be fixed when I actually installed Mandriva.

The screenshots below were taken when running the MandrivaOne Live Gnome CD for 32 bit / i586 in a VMWare Virtual Machine, allocated with 256MB of RAM. I initially tried running just off the live CD and then actually installed it. I had no issues printing from live CDs of Fedora and Ubuntu using the same setup, although Fedora was a bit slow and unrepsonsive; once I upped the RAM to 384MB Fedora ran fine.

When running from the live CD, and plugging my Canon ip4300 into the virtual machine, Mandriva didn't do anything (whereas both Fedora and Ubuntu automatically detected and installed it). I ran the Mandriva Linux Control Center and went to install the printer, and got the following error message:

Could not install the CUPS printing system!

Still unsure whether this was a problem with Mandriva or the fact it was a live CD (despite Fedora and Ubuntu having no issues printing from a live CD), I decided to install Mandriva Linux onto this particular virtual machine. After the install process and booting into the fully installed system, Mandriva did this time attempt to install the printer when it was plugged in, but I got the same error message as displayed in the screenshot above.

I found it rather odd that Mandriva appears to have come without printing support "out of the box", but a quick Internet search suggested checking the software packages to see if CUPS printing was actually installed.

I fired up the Mandriva Linux Control Center, which is shown in the screenshot below, and clicked the "Manage Software" button.

This gave the following prompt:

Clicking the yes button then displayed another prompt asking if I wanted to update the media sources.

This seemed like a good idea, so I clicked "Yes" and then got the next prompt:

Hmm ok. Not really knowing what to do, I selected the "Official Updates" And look, another step...

Now to select the FTP server...

And now the packages list updates...

And finally I'm into the software management screen as shown below. It all looks pretty straight forward to use, with selection browsing icons on the left, and a search fuction at the top. So far so good. You can see in the sreenshot that I've browsed to "Printing" and it shows cups and various other printing packages. However, for whatever reason, you can also see these aren't installed by default.

So I clicked on the checkbox next to the "cups" package, and then next to the "cups-common" package, and received the error messages as shown below:

Sorry, the following package cannot be selected: cups-1.3.0-3.2mdv2008.0.i586

Sorry, the following package cannot be selected: cups-common-1.3.0-3.2mdv2008.0.i586 (due to unsatisfied libslp.so.1)

This is real "WTF" stuff. Not only is printing not installed by default in Mandriva 2008.0 (at least from the i586 Mandriva One Live Gnome CD, anyway) but I still couldn't install it. I noticed there was an update for libcups2 so installed that, but I still wasn't able to install cups. I closed down the software management tool, and then opened it up again, this time clicking the "Distribution Sources" button. After it had done its thing, and the software management tool was ready for me to use, I was now finally able to install cups, as shown in the screenshots below.

So finally, I had CUPS installed. I'm still blown away that it's not enabled by default on Mandriva, which has always been touted as such a user friendly Linux distro. I plugged the printer back in, and lo and behold - successs!

I'll spare you the rest of the screenshots I took, which just show me selecting which driver to use etc. Obviously you'd need to set up those distributions sources anyway in order to install additional software etc, but I am really quite amazed that printing doesn't just work by default in Mandriva. I guess if the distribution sources had been enabled already, then CUPS would have auto installed when I first plugged the printer in. If this is the case, you'd think Mandriva would configured the sources when it installs.