Slack 10; HP 3845; CUPS; Unable to print from command line
 

Background: Running Slack 10, have HP deskjet 3845 (usb printer), using CUPS.

Problem: CUPS prints out the test page fine, KDE printer manager prints out test page fine, I can print text from KDE based applications, (no graphics however, like PDF's) but no other programs seem to be able to find the printer, and I can't do anything at the command line:

chris@home:~$ lpstat
Printer 'HomePrinter@localhost' - cannot open connection - No such file or directory
Make sure the remote host supports the LPD protocol
and accepts connections from this host and from non-privileged (>1023) ports
Printer 'HomePrinter@localhost' - cannot open connection - No such file or directory
Make sure the remote host supports the LPD protocol
and accepts connections from this host and from non-privileged (>1023) ports

What am I missing?

Thanks in advance,
Chris

Only a guess. Did you rmove the lp and cups packages after install, then re-install the cups package? If both packages were selected during the install (I believe they are as default) lp overwrites the links setup by the cups package.

/herbc

No, I didn't, but could you tell me what the links should be so I can verify their status before I try that?

ls -l /usr/bin/lp*

lp -> lp-cups
lp-lprng -> lpr
lpq -> lpq-cups
lpr -> lpr-cups
lprm -> lprm-cups
lpstat -> lpstat-cups

More links in /usr/man[1358]

From Patrick's e-mail to root (login as root, run mail from CLI, select message 2).

There is also another printing system called CUPS that's becoming more
popular. CUPS takes the place of lprng to spool print jobs. It also
does many of the same things as apsfilter. If you've done a full
installation and you want to use CUPS, you might want to reinstall
the CUPS package to set various links (like /usr/bin/lpr) to point
to the CUPS versions -- these locations are shared between LPRng and
CUPS, and all of the links will be pointed to the programs from
whichever package (cups or lprng) was installed last. Normally this
will be LPRng.

Good hunting. /herbc

herbc,
You were right, it was a symbolic link issue. They all were pointing to lpd so I changed them to *-cups and it works just great.

Thanks,
Chris

One other issue with my printer: HPIODDIR and HPSSDDIR in the rc.d hplip file aren't pointed to anything. Once I modified (the rc.hplip file since I use slackware) hplip file to point (as below) they came up fine upon restarting hplip:
HPIODDIR=/usr/sbin
HPSSDDIR=/usr/share/hplip

Chris
Chris