Dutch blog

My Dutch blog is at http://andre-nl.blogspot.com

25 January 2012

Unable to get list of printer drivers

When trying to set up my BeagleBoard as a CUPS server, I ran into a problem. When trying to add the printer, I got the message
Unable to get list of printer drivers:      Unknown
When googeling for this probem, I ran into various forums reporting this problem, but I haven't found a solution. So, here it is:

Looking at /var/log/cups/error_log I noticed:

...
W [25/Jan/2012:13:39:43 +0100] [CGI] Missing NickName and ModelName in /usr/share/cups/model/foomatic-db-ppds/Epson/eplp830c.ppd.gz!
W [25/Jan/2012:13:39:43 +0100] [CGI] Missing NickName and ModelName in /usr/share/cups/model/foomatic-db-ppds/Epson/eplp980c.ppd.gz!
W [25/Jan/2012:13:39:43 +0100] [CGI] Missing NickName and ModelName in /usr/share/cups/model/foomatic-db-ppds/Epson
...
It seems there is something wrong with the foomatic drivers, removing the foomatic drivers made a list of drivers appear. Since the hplip driver depends on foomatic-db and foomatic-db-engine, the hplip driver cannot be used, so I am using the gutenprint drivers instead, and this made CUPS working fine.

This problem applied to ArchLinuxARM for the Beagleboard, which is armv7l.
I have verified this solution to apply to the x86_64 version of ArchLinux as well.



5 comments:

Unknown said...
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Jose said...

Hilariously, I just started doing the same thing yesterday. I've been trying most of today to find a different work-around, but no luck.

Know where/how to submit a bug report on this?

Andre said...

Not sure really... thing is, I found it on ArchLinuxARM but it also appears in normal ArchLinux. So, should I report it to both?

Jose said...

Both would probably be fine. Let me know where you do post so I can come in and say I'm having the same problem.

I'm running ArchLinux on a Seagate Dockstar with a PSC 14010v attached. Unfortunately, I need to have hplip installed so I can get the scanner to work, so the work-around is not a viable solution for me.

Andre said...

Well I did a little more research before reporting this

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/28105

It seems the package foomatic-db-engine is causing the problem, Unfortunately this is the dependency for hplip.

However, taking a closer look at the logs, it seems to drop a readme file in a directory where only drivers are supposed to be. I suppose removing the readme file will solve the problem.

E [26/Jan/2012:00:12:22 +0100] [cups-driverd] Bad driver information file "/usr/share/cups/model/foomatic-db-ppds/Kyocera/ReadMe.htm"!