Arch Linux

flittermice

Member

From: Vienna

Registered: 2013-09-07

Posts: 17

Printing impossible from any application

At the moment two of my Computers suffer the same problem:
Every attempt to print something (PDF from viewer, HTML from browser, ...) which would call the system dialog for printing results in a hanging application that must be killed. The print dialog is never being opened.

System: 1 x Arch Linux, 1 x CachyOS
Gnome 49, Wayland

Things I tried:
- Logs: There are no hints in the CUPS log (with debug enabled).
- Downgrading cups did not help.
- Downgrading gnome-shell did not help.
- I added a new user and installed KDE Plasma. Same effect!

I'm not printing very often, so it may be that the problem already exists since a few days.

tzeb

Member

Registered: 2009-04-29

Posts: 2

Re: Printing impossible from any application

Downgrading cups and libcups to 2.4.14-1 and a reboot solved the problem for me.

orbit-oc

Member

Registered: 2024-12-15

Posts: 87

Re: Printing impossible from any application

I've got the same problems here. LibreOffice and Firefox open the print dialogue, but all other applications don't. The dialogue windows remain stuck while loading and the application has to be killed.
I suspect that the update from cups to 2.4.15 is the cause, but I haven't downgraded.

Thanks for your message..

flittermice

Member

From: Vienna

Registered: 2013-09-07

Posts: 17

Re: Printing impossible from any application

Thanks very much!
I had only downgraded "cups" alone and not libcups.

SOLUTION: downgrading "cups" and "libcups" to 2.4.14 helped. Not even a reboot was necessary.
I used the tool downgrade from the AUR.

Shouldn't we report that somewhere?

user69

Member

Registered: 2025-09-26

Posts: 2

Re: Printing impossible from any application

https://github.com/OpenPrinting/cups/issues/1429

Thah

Member

Registered: 2014-09-15

Posts: 5

Re: Printing impossible from any application

Running

 cupsd -t 

in a terminal reveals some unrecognized tags after upgrading to v 2.4.15 , see e.g.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/question … ost6603317

After sifting through /etc/cups/cupsd.conf  commenting out the offending tags, 

systemctl start cups

seems to work. For me the tags were all set to

default

so in theory this should not cause problems.

Last edited by Thah (2025-11-29 13:17:35)

dkeruza

Member

Registered: 2025-12-01

Posts: 1

Re: Printing impossible from any application

Same issue here.
I am in KDE plasma and the issue only happens when printing from a GTK application, If I use the print function from any Plasma (QT) application, it works fine.

I tried doing:

cupsd -t

But it didn't show any errors.

So I ended up downgrading cups and libcups to version 2.4.14 and it started working again.

Should we report this?

orbit-oc

Member

Registered: 2024-12-15

Posts: 87

Re: Printing impossible from any application

cups 2:2.4.15-2  libcups 2:2.4.15-2

The problem seems to be solved with this update...

Thah

Member

Registered: 2014-09-15

Posts: 5

Re: Printing impossible from any application

@dkeruza

Seems like there was same change to how the config files are read causing problems for some folks (like me) to start cupsd, on top of the main problem.

flittermice

Member

From: Vienna

Registered: 2013-09-07

Posts: 17

Re: Printing impossible from any application

yes, version 2.4.15-2 fixed that.
I'm astonished how fast this happened. Arch Linux is great :-D
THANKS guys!

rt4me

Member

Registered: Yesterday

Posts: 1

Re: Printing impossible from any application

I had a similar issue, and the update I ran this morning fixed the freezing issue, but now my printer just spits out blank pages, seemingly unending, for a single-page PDF. Tried the CUPS test page and had the same effect.

seth

Member

From: Don't DM me only for attention

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 70,863

Re: Printing impossible from any application

Only w/ gtk or also w/ Qt or lp (the latter had never been affected by the discussed bug)?
Does downgrading cups to the previously working version restore function?

The symptom suggest you're sending the PDF as raw data what's usually a misconfigured printer and/or broken filter.
=> https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CUPS/Troubleshooting enable debugging, restart cups, try to print something and post the logs.
Probably open a new thread for that as it doesn't fit the general symptom/problem ITT.

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