FIX: Ubuntu Dapper upgrade breaks CUPS printing; reinstall fixes it.

2006-06-11 Randall Lucas

Upon upgrading my Ubuntu installation to Dapper using a simple:

sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list  

to add the Dapper repositories, and then

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade  

I discovered that my printing no longer worked. I just previously been printing (and sharing my printer with a Windows / Mac mixed environment) just fine from my HP multifunction printer.

Among other errors, I kept receiving a note in my logs to the effect of:

cupsdAuthorize: Local authentication certificate not found!  

I looked around and found what appeared to be a certficate in /etc/cups/certs but that didn’t change anything. In frustration, I tried simply reinstalling cupsys with:

sudo apt-get remove cupsys sudo apt-get install cupsys  

To my surprise, after doing this and reconfiguring the printer, everything worked OK again. My theory is that the upgrade did not upgrade the certificate (or clobbered an old one, thereby breaking it), and that reinstalling caused a fresh cert to take effect.

This may not be your solution; there were other, more serious problems with CUPS in Dapper, as detailed here: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/45099

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