Rollout of XP SP3 to my laptop has stopped some CUPS printers working!

Paul McIlfatrick paul.mcilfatrick at bt.com
Fri Jul 17 07:18:09 PDT 2009


> Our company is rolling out Windows XP SP3 to its laptops.
>
> My laptop had SP3 installed last week. Now I can no longer print to some of my installed CUPS printers with Printers and Faxes window showing 'Unable to connect' against these.
>
> The strange thing is I have four CUPS printers installed on my laptop, two Xerox M35 printers, one HP LJ4200, and a Xerox colour 8560 - three show the message 'Unable to connect' in the Printers and Faxes window but one of the Xerox M35 printers is OK showing 'Ready' and I can print using it.
>
> All my colleague's laptops still on XP SP2 can print fine using CUPS!
>
>
> Our CUPS is version 1.3.7 and was built from scratch on PC running Ubuntu 8.04 server in May 2008. All the client drivers are Point'n'Print.
>
> Also, every Xerox M35 CUPS printer was created using the same printer ppd driver file.
>
> The CUPS log files do not report any problems.
>
>
> When I open a CUPS window on my laptop and right-click on a printer and select Connect as I have done to install a printer in the past, I now get the message "The server for the printer does not have the correct printer driver installed. If you want to search for the proper driver, click OK. Otherwise, click Cancel and contact your network administrator or original equipment manufacturer for the correct printer driver."
>
> If I follow the instructions and install a local printer then I can print to the CUPS printer!
>
>
> Any help with this problem would most appreciated.


After some trial and error I eventually managed to resolve this problem by uploading new printer drivers to our CUPS server using the Windows' Add Printer Wizard (APW).

The upload of drivers would not work from my XP laptop which I had used to do this when the CUPS server was built in May 2008 - the problem may be because of SP3 having been installed on it recently!

After this failure I then thought of trying an old Windows 2000 PC. When I issued the following command in a cmd window on it the installation of the new drivers worked:

 runas /netonly /user:root "rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /p /t3 /n \\printhost\printername"


Hope this note will be of some help to others.


Paul McIlfatrick





More information about the cups mailing list