Cannot print from mate desktop

[Polytropon]

On Tue, 29 Jan 2019 15:49:50 -0500, James B. Byrne via freebsd-questions wrote:
> FreeBSD-11.2p8
> 
> Following a massive pkg update this morning, followed by a
> freebsd-update install and restart, I now discover that I cannot print
> from the mate desktop.  When I print from any application on the
> desktop, libreoffice, pluma, firefox, the printer dialogue shows up,
> the print job is generated, but nothing prints on the printer.  Nor
> can I find any printer management applet in the toolbar.
> 
> I can print test pages from cups web admin. At least that is what the
> software claims.  But they do not appear on the printer either.  Nor
> are they reported in the lpr queue or on the CUPS web admin page.  The
> printer self test page can be generated from CUPS.
> 
> The spooler appears to be working.

Do the jobs get stuck in the queue, or do they simply
disappear from it?

Check CUPS's error log file to see if there is something
related to post-queue job handling (like printer filter
missing).



> # lpstat -a
> cups-pdf accepting requests since Thu Nov 22 10:12:47 2018
> np4172 accepting requests since Tue Jan 29 15:31:51 2019
> np4173 accepting requests since Tue Jan 29 14:40:46 2019
> np4174 accepting requests since Mon Jan 14 15:07:11 2019
> np4175 accepting requests since Mon Jan 14 18:06:15 2019
> 
> But CUPs reports two jobs as stopped and restarting them does not get
> to print. Instead they show up in the completed job list as aborted.

That is very strange. Make sure you can "cupsenable <name>"
and "cupsaccept <name>" the printer. After doing so, check
the error log file again.



> cat /var/spool/lpd/np4172/status
> sending to np4172
> 
> Enscript from the command line prints, but the duplex option selected
> did not have any effect.  I reused an earlier command which had
> previously printed as duplex.

I'm using gs (GhostScript) for this, works quite nicely.



> Is there a package required for mate to have printing capabilities? If
> what is its name?

I think it's not a Mate problem, from what you're describing.
Some "moving parts" of CUPS have been disturbed. You should
be able to do things like "lpr something.pdf" via CLI, and
it should work as expected - job appears in "lpq" output,
then printer starts printing, "lpq" output is empty. As you
have verified that you can print directly, without using
CUPS, the problem won't be the printer.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...