net-print/cups-pdf Just Won't Work (tm).

[Nightweaver]

Hi, folks. We've recently purchased a brand spanking new laser printer for the home network, giving me a reason to finally get around to installing and configuring cups. I've installed the printer, and finally got it working (albeit not optimally; the printer's really new, so I have to pretend it's a slightly older model), but then decided to also set up a PDF printer - since I could.

I've installed cups-pdf, read through the readme, restarted cups, added the printer using the web interface (using the colour postscript driver), and then restarted again for good measure. Unfortunately, nothing seems to work - whenever I try to print, the "printer" turns itself off (switches to 'stopped') and won't restart until I delete the job from the queue.

I've left pretty much all the cups settings at their default, though I tried temporarily changing user and group to root, as well as specifying the "NoChangeUser" option, or whatever it's called, to No - none of which seemed to work (after restarting cups, of course).

Has anyone got the cups-pdf virtual printer working? If so, can they shed some light on how?

Some snippets of info:

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~x86
Installed versions:
net-print/cups-1.1.21-r2
net-print/cups-pdf-1.6.4
app-text/ghostscript-7.07.1-r7

Thanks for any assistance.

[nobspangle]

I updated cups-pdf to 1.52 with emerge -uD world and now it doesn't work, I have also tried the 1.64 version without luck. I've tried reemerging ghostscript but that hasn't helped.
I've had a look at the ebuild but there is nothing to it. cups-pdf is so simple it should just work, and for me it always has done.

Going back to 1.31 fixes my problem I think I'll file a bug

[nicdoo]

Hello
I succeeded installing and runing cups-PDF after installing (emerging) several new versions of cups-pdf, cups, samba, ghostscript...

here are the versions I used but the problem is the same with older version :
net-print/cups-1.1.22
net-print/cups-pdf-1.6.4
app-text/ghostscript-7.07.1-r7
net-fs/samba-3.0.7-r1

Trying to print . . .
Allways the same error message in the log (/var/log/cups/cups-pdf_log):
[ERROR] failed to set file mode for PDF file (/var/spool/cups-pdf/ANONYMOUS/Test_Page.pdf)

so I recompiled cups-pdf manually to know more, increasing debug level
here is what is executed :

/bin/su - "nobody" -s /bin/sh -c "/usr/bin/gs -q -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER -sDEVICE=pdfwrite sOutputFile=/var/spool/cups-pdf/nobody/Page_de_test.pdf -dAutoRotatePages=/PageByPage -dAutoFilterColorImages=false -dColorImageFilter=/FlateEncode -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -c save pop -f /var/spool/cups-pdf/SPOOL/cups2pdf-1078"

Running this command manually just don't work for these reasons :
1 - the "-s" parameter for su is not supported in my gentoo
2 - even if I do without the "-s" parameter nothing works
3 - executing the gs command only, getting this result :
**** Unable to open the initial device, quitting.
the "pdfwriter" device is not valid on my gentoo . . .

Conclusions :
1 - Whe had very few chances for having a pdf generated
2 - Initial Error message "[ERROR] failed to set file mode for PDF file" that allways focused me on a cups configuration problem, should have been "[ERROR] failed generate the PDF file"

Solution : (not taking care of security issues)

1 - uncompress the ebuild package on your root's home directory

[mkrisch]

found an easier recompile solution. in cups-pdf.h there's a definition for CPSH and the comment notes that if your distro doesn't support the -s command, set CPSH to "".

with a recompile that seemed to fix the problem.

--mk

[wulu]

Thanks,

works perfectly :)

just added this line to the ebuild

[Freak_NL]

Thanks!

I ran into this problem as well, but the modified ebuild fixes it. Has this been submitted to the Gentoo Bugzilla?

[Nightweaver]

Yeah, it has. Hopefully it'll be integrated soon.
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