Reparing CUPS

By Cèbe, . Permalink Ubuntu

I wanted to print some random document on old but reliable HP PSC-1300 when I discovered my printer was gone -- Ubuntu wouldn't recognize it anymore!

I first tried to reinstall two packages: hplip and cups, without any success. I then tried to register the printer manually, using the hp-setup utility. It would go for a couple of screens, then decide it has enough with a marvelous and cryptic Printer queue setup failed. Please restart CUPS and try again error message.

I went back to the command line, and ran sudo /etc/init.d/cups restart. CUPS was definitely not in its best shape, as it answered with:

* Starting Common Unix Printing System: cupsd
   cupsd: Child exited on signal 6!
                                                              [fail]

I checked the event log: sudo tail -f /var/log/messages, which said

kernel: [2700.403790] type=1503 audit(1252836407.192:11): 
operation="sysctl" requested_mask="r::" denied_mask="r::" fsuid=0 
name="/proc/sys/crypto/fips_enabled" pid=6245 profile="/usr/sbin/cupsd"

What was I supposed to do? I googled a bit, then found out:

  1. AppArmor was preventing CUPS from working properly
  2. It happened since I used some non standard repository, which brought me a newer version of libgcrypt11 (1.4.4-2ubuntu2 instead of 1.4.1-2ubuntu1)

There is a pretty good description of the problem in this bug report: cupsd: Child exited on signal 6

I bet this will be fixed when Karmic Koala comes out. For now, I ran the following command:

sudo aa-complain cups

Which enabled CUPS again.

Oh the fun! And I thought I was free of "DLL Hell" under Ubuntu. Looks like I found an equivalent ;-) Of course, this wouldn't happen if I kept only the stable and official repositories.

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