I seem to have the strangest problems. I put MEPIS (3.3 test, the 2.6.10 kernel) on a laptop recently and everything was (finally) going great, especially my previous problem with wireless. That is the only distribution I currently use on a desktop and a laptop. In fact, I wasn't sure where to post this, but my current problem is printing/package related, so I thought a general forum might be okay.

Anyway, after the install, I had some problems when I tried to connect to my print server. My desktop previously made the hookup just fine (many newbie problems, but those are expected, when I finally connected, I did have a cathartic moment).

So there I was with the laptop, sailed through the install, it found the wireless all on its own, and as I was screwing around trying to configure CUPS, the backend screen, which was previously accessible, had every choice grayed out. Nothing could be chosen on it. I was in admin mode, so that didn't make sense. As a test, I logged out and just tried it as straight root. Same thing happened.

I tried the old Windoze trick of uninstalling anything CUPS related. However, when I came to libcupsys2-gnutils10, when I hit "uninstall", I get a list of 181 (unrelated) apps that come up to uninstall, many of them part of what I believe to be operating system related.

I have already used the live CD to see if I can repair the installation, but I get a file system error (and of course I am not sure if that is related to my problem, or if it is a separate problem). I also don't know if that would even repair the type of problem I have.

I have had to do the "Windoze 3.1" fix (that is, keep reinstalling the system every time I can't figure out a problem). Once again, on this one, I don't see any other way. Have I got this file system so mixed up that it is the only solution?

I saw a list of conflicts listed when I went to do the uninstall, I believe I may have been blindly trying to update anything CUPS related without understanding what I was doing. So I don't really know if this is part of the basic install, or if I put this on myself. I think I got used to not really seeing anything with conflicts, and I probably did that to myself. Does that sound likely? Should I start over one more time and maybe SLOW DOWN and read? Anyone seen this before and know an easy fix? (It won't kill me, but I have already configured this quite a bit and loaded a lot of stuff. Then again, I guess it is good practice...)

To check if cups is up:
Start a browser and open the address:
http://localhost:631
If this doesn't work, log in as root, do a
$ rccups start
and try again.

If this doesn't work at all, please post again.