I've been following the instructions in another thread ( Printing In Slack 9.1 - HowTo ) regarding reinstalling CUPS in order to smooth over printer configuration, but have hit a couple of snags.

1) The previous thread suggested using checkinstall to create a CUPS package and install it. I have downloaded checkinstall from linuxpackages.net and have used it as directed. Partway through the packaging process I get an error message saying "Copying to temporary directories - FAILED!"

If I then follow the process through, install the package that checkinstall creates and try to run CUPS, I get an error message saying 'Child exited - status 2' or something similar. (Apologies for the vagueness, but I was so ticked off I didn't write down the exact message because I was too busy biting through my desk.)

Using removepkg then generates a whole list of messages saying 'deleting empty directory' followed by the directory name, which suggests that the necessary files aren't going where they should... but why?

2) The instructions in the previous thread run along the lines of :

tar -xzvf cups*
cd cups
./configure
make
checkinstall

Having followed these and found that the last step went awry, I decided to try something else and typed 'make install'. Again, lots of nice messages generated - nothing leapt out as being wrong this time around. But again, attempting to start CUPS came up with a similar 'Child exited' message, but with 98 replacing 2.

Presumably I am missing something blindingly obvious, but if someone could point me in the write direction I'd be much obliged.

I don't know if it help but checkinstall need to be run as root, while try to avoid be root when running make, be root just for checkinstall.

Just in case anyone's been following this thread with bated breath waiting to know the outcome...

Er, checkinstall still doesn't seem to work. Not entirely sure why. Eventually I just gave it up as a bad job and reinstalled CUPS from the original Slack disks and it works fine.

Moral of the story:

1) Don't blindly follow someone else's suggestions without knowing what you're doing, as I have done - your mileage may vary.

2) Don't bl***dy well complicate things when you don't have to!