How do I start a "not ready" cups printer ?
 

I write an maintain Business Basic applications running on flavours of unix. We have recently migrated some of our clients to Feodora and configured the printers under cups. When a printer runs out of paper and goes into a "not ready" state, how do you make it "ready" again ! Being a complete linux novice ( my linux support techie is on hols ) I thought i would try lpc start <printer name > but just got the reply start not supported under cups of words to that effect - can anyone help me ! ?

try using some browser to connect to http://<pc with cups>:631. this is a webinterface for cups.

greetz,
-= iluvatar =-

thanks for the swift reply, but this doesn't give me the solution ! I am accessing this machine through an Intel VPN tunnel which gives me precious little ability other than the use of my telnet client ( Anzio ) - sorry to be "old fashioned", but I am searching for the ACTUAL COMMAND/S that I can type in in the absence of remote browser access

This has been a lonely question at the top of the Google search for years. I happened to stumble across the answer today.

Yes, the web link to localhost:631 worked great for me. I happen to have CUPS 1.3.11 on Debian, and the Printers tab has a "Start Printer" or "Stop Printer" button depending if the printer is currently running or not. It worked great, but it was hiding the command line equivalent.

I happen to have a copy of the CUPS book, and it mentions two commands, viz:

/usr/bin/enable <name>

and

/usr/bin/disable <name>

to start and stop printer queues. Alas, Debian does not have enable/disable commands that I could find. I did a little more digging, and an "apropos cups" command (part of the "man" facility) showed a lot of commands related to CUPS. In particular, I spotted "/usr/sbin/cupsenable" and "/usr/sbin/cupsdisable". Sure enough, on Debian CUPS, these are the command line versions to enable and disable printer queues.


Best regards,

Lester

Thank you
 

I registered to this site to thank you, tangoholic. You really saved the day with this post. Thank you!!!!

"/usr/sbin/cupsenable" and "/usr/sbin/cupsdisable". Sure enough, on Debian CUPS, these are the command line versions to enable and disable printer queues.

Works on Fedora 14 also.
Thank you! Thought i had lost the use of my printer until the next reboot just because i tried to print when it was off.

or this one

service cups restart