Foreword
If you are experiencing a problem with printing, please take a look at the common bugs page before filing a bug. If the problem you are seeing is not listed there or none of the workarounds seem to help, please consider filing a bug report to help us make Fedora run better on your hardware.
Identifying your problem area
Printing troubleshooter
The first thing to try is to run the printing troubleshooter. Install system-config-printer:
su -c 'dnf install system-config-printer'
Start the Print Settings application, or else you can run it from the command line:
system-config-printer
Then select Help > Troubleshoot from the menu bar. This will ask a series of questions about the problem you are experiencing, with the aim of finding the reason for the problem.
After following this process you will most likely end up with a troubleshoot.txt file. This is the most helpful thing you can add to a bug report.
One step in this process is to print a test page. There is a button in the troubleshooter to print a test page for you, but if the problem you are seeing is specific to printing from a certain application, or printing a certain document, just go ahead and print from that application or print that particular document. The print job will appear in the troubleshooting window -- just put a tick in the box next to that print job to say that it is the one you are having trouble with.
If the problem was not found automatically you will be given the option to save the diagnostic information collected during the troubleshooting process in a file named troubleshoot.txt. If you report a bug you should attach this file, not compressed, with the MIME type set as text/plain.
Getting debug information by other means
If you are unable to use the printing troubleshooter for whatever reason, here are the steps to follow in order to get debugging information.
1. Enable full debugging information with:
su -c 'cupsctl LogLevel=debug2'
2. restart cups service with:
su -c 'systemctl restart cups.service'
3. Trigger the error condition you are trying to diagnose by e.g. printing something.
4. To turn off debugging information, do this:
su -c 'cupsctl --no-debug-logging'
5. Fetch the log messages.
View the log messages with:
journalctl -u cups -e
or:
journalctl -u cups --since=...
To filter out messages relating to a specific job ID, use:
journalctl -u cups JID=...
(tab completion will show you which job IDs have log messages)
Gathering debug information from cups-browsed
cups-browsed daemon was introduced in Fedora around cups-1.5 version. It can browse Bonjour broadcasts, CUPS broadcasts (deprecated) and LDAP servers for printers and create or remove local raw queues pointing to these printers. It can creates broadcasts of local CUPS queues, but it is marked as deprecated.
For setting debug logging on you need to add:
DebugLogging stderr
to /etc/cups/cups-browsed.conf and restart cups-browsed service. Then logs are available in journal.
What make and model is my printer?
Each different printer has a model-specific Device ID. The printing troubleshooter attempts to collect this information from the printer, but you can do it yourself with the lpinfo command:
su -c "lpinfo -l -v"
This command runs each of the backends in discovery mode, to get them to report devices they can automatically detect. This will output a series of blocks of lines, each one like this:
Device: uri = usb://HP/DESKJET%20990C?serial=U123456789AB
class = direct
info = HP DESKJET 990C
make-and-model = HP DESKJET 990C
device-id = MFG:HEWLETT-PACKARD;MDL:DESKJET 990C;CMD:MLC,PCL,PML;CLS:PRI
NTER;DES:Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 990C;SN:U123456789AB;S:00808880800010032C100000
0C2000000;P:0800,FL,B0;J: ;
location =
The line which identifies this particular model type is the long one that starts "device-id =" (shown here wrapping over three lines).
Note that if your printer cannot be automatically detected, you may still be able to find out the Device ID by running the appropriate backend with the printer hostname as the argument. The usb, parallel, snmp, and dnssd backends all try to report the actual Device ID given by the printer.
$ /usr/lib/cups/backend/snmp 10.34.18.3 network socket://10.34.18.3 "HP Color LaserJet CP2025dn" "HP Color LaserJet CP2025dn" "MFG:Hewlett-Packard;CMD:PJL,PML,PCLXL,POSTSCRIPT,PCL;MDL:HP Color LaserJet CP2025dn; CLS:PRINTER;DES:Hewlett-Packard Color LaserJet CP2025dn;MEM:MEM=55MB;COMMENT:RES=600x8;" "HP Color LaserJet CP2025dn"
Device ID is in this case (see backend(7)) the last but one field.
Which driver am I using?
The PPD file for the printer queue can tell you which driver is in use. You can use this command to find out which driver is being used:
grep -H '^*NickName:' /etc/cups/ppd/*.ppd
You can also find this out using the system-config-printer application. Double-click on the icon for the queue and look at the Make and Model field.
To see the available drivers, click on the Change... button next to that field. You might find it useful to try another driver to see if that shows the same problem.
Finding where the problem lies
When a print job is processed it is sent through a chain of filters to convert the file into a format the printer can understand, and then finally sent to a backend, a program which can transport the data to the printer. By slightly changing how you print you can try a different printing path to see if that changes anything. If it works around the problem, you know which area the problem was in -- include that information in a bug report so that we can fix it.
Application
Try printing from a different application to see if the problem goes away or if it occurs regardless of how a file is printed. Try printing the document from the command line using the lp command.
Document format
If you are having problems printing PDF files, try printing other types of file to see if the problem is with printing anything or if it is specific to printing PDF files. Try converting the file to a different format and printing that.
If the problem relates to printing text files, try removing/installing the paps package. This package provides an alternative text-to-PostScript filter to the one that comes with CUPS.
To inspect the document that was submitted to CUPS for printing, enable the PreserveJobFiles option like this:
cupsctl PreserveJobFiles=yes
Submitted job documents will remain in /var/spool/cups.
Running filters by hand
More advanced users may like to try running the CUPS filters by hand and examining the data file at each step as it is converted between different formats. Here is an example of doing this for a gutenprint queue named pqueue with the CUPS test page which is its own special MIME type, application/vnd.cups-banner:
First you need to know the filter pipeline for application/vnd.cups-banner --> printer/pqueue (output MIME type). You can either enable debugging, print a test page, look into /var/log/cups/error_log and you'll find something similar to:
envp[29]="FINAL_CONTENT_TYPE=printer/pqueue" Started filter /usr/lib/cups/filter/bannertopdf (PID 1111) Started filter /usr/lib/cups/filter/pdftopdf (PID 1112) Started filter /usr/lib/cups/filter/gstoraster (PID 1113) Started filter /usr/lib/cups/filter/rastertogutenprint.5.2 (PID 1114)
or run
/usr/lib/cups/filter/bannertopdf 1 me '' 1 '' </usr/share/cups/data/testprint >bannertopdf.pdf cupsfilter -e -m printer/pqueue -p /etc/cups/ppd/pqueue.ppd bannertopdf.pdf > /dev/null
and you'll see:
INFO: pdftopdf (PID 1111) started. INFO: gstoraster (PID 1112) started. INFO: rastertogutenprint.5.2 (PID 1113) started.
This filter pipeline is from cups-1.6. With cups < 1.6 you can see bannertops -> pstops -> pstoraster instead.
Now you can run filters by hand:
export PPD=/etc/cups/ppd/pqueue.ppd /usr/lib/cups/filter/bannertopdf 1 me '' 1 '' </usr/share/cups/data/testprint >bannertopdf.pdf /usr/lib/cups/filter/pdftopdf 1 me '' 1 '' <bannertopdf.pdf >pdftopdf.pdf /usr/lib/cups/filter/pdftoraster 1 me '' 1 ''<pdftopdf.pdf >out.ras /usr/lib/cups/filter/rastertogutenprint.5.2 1 me '' 1 ''<out.ras >out.prn
Here, evince or okular can be used to examine the output after the first two filters, rasterview can be used to examine the output of the third filter, and the last filter's output must be inspected by hand or sent directly (lpr -oraw out.prn) to the printer.
Driver
If you have access to a different make/model of printer it might be worth trying to see if the problem occurs on both of them or just one. This can give an indication about whether it is a problem with a particular driver, or if it is a more general problem.
Even if you only have access to the one printer there is often a choice of drivers to use for a given printer model, and trying each one in turn can be useful in narrowing down the problem. See above for how to do that.
Foomatic
For Foomatic drivers you can try enabling Foomatic debugging by editing the file /etc/foomatic/filter.conf and adding a line:
debug: 1
Next time you print a job to a queue using foomatic the debugging will be put in /tmp/foomatic-rip.log, and the input file as received by foomatic-rip will be in /tmp/foomatic-rip.ps.
Backend (job transport)
It may be possible for you to try a different backend. Using system-config-printer, double-click on the printer queue icon and click the Change... button next to the Device URI field. You may see a Connection expander arrow near the bottom right hand corner of the window -- click that to see which backends are available. For USB-connected HP printers, typically either of the hp and usb backends can be used.
For network printers you may have different protocols you can try.
- socket is for HP JetDirect (usually port 9100)
- lpd is for older style UNIX print shares
- smb is for CIFS shares from Windows systems
- ipp is for Internet Printing Protocol-enabled devices and also for other CUPS servers
- You can capture the IPP traffic with tcpdump like this (the interface name may differ from p4p1):
tcpdump -n -i p4p1 -U -s0 -w ipp.pcap port ipp
- bjnp is for Canon's proprietary bjnp network protocol (usually port 8611)
Configuration tool
If your problem relates to configuring print queues, try using one of the other methods of doing so. There are four available:
- The GNOME 3 System Settings application (control-center), System Settings > Printers from the GNOME Shell
- system-config-printer, System > Administration > Printing from the GNOME menu
- the CUPS web interface, http://localhost:631/
- the command line tools lpadmin, lpoptions, cupsctl, cupsaccept, cupsenable etc.
Filing a bug report
Deciding which component
Problems involving printing may relate to several components.
The configuration GUI (See above) is either GNOME 3 System Settings application or system-config-printer. These packages also provide the printer applet, handle automatic queue creation, and disable/enable queues when USB printers are disconnected and reconnected.
Most GTK+ applications use the GTK+ print dialog. If the problem occurs when using GTK+ applications but not when printing from the command line or from another non-GTK+ application, the problem should probably be reported against gtk2. If the problem occurs with only one GTK+ application, and other GTK+ applications print fine, the bug should be filed against that particular application.
If the problem only happens with PDF files, the bug may well be in poppler (the CUPS pdftops filter is a wrapper around one of the poppler utility programs).
Report bugs only seen using the smb backend against samba.
For bugs only seen when using the hp backend, or the hpijs or hpcups drivers, select hplip for the component.
For bugs for cups-browsed daemon and its printer discovery, please select cups-filters
Other possibilities, depending on the problem, include:
- foomatic (the Foomatic CUPS filter and driver)
- foomatic-db (the actual printer database used by Foomatic)
- ghostscript (which converts PostScript to other formats)
- gutenprint (a driver that supports very many printers)
For anything else, or if you are not sure, choose cups or use your best guess.
Other information to include
Be prepared to include some information about your system as well. Some of this can be gathered automatically using the printing troubleshooter, but you may also need to include other information such as:
- the PPD file for the print queue (from the
/etc/cups/ppddirectory) - the document you are attempting to print -- if this is large, please try to see if the problem also occurs with a smaller document
- if cups logs cannot be gathered by system-config-printer, attach cupsd journal logs. How-to is above
- make and model of printer
- config files - /etc/cups/client.conf (if it contains any changes from default), /etc/cups/cupsd.conf
- if issue is with cups-browsed and printer's discovery, attach /etc/cups/cups-browsed.conf and cups-browsed logs gained by how-to above.
Some example documents can be found in the Printing Test Cases category.
Further reading
The main printing page has more information about how printing works in Fedora.
Known issues
Here are several known issues, which arise with certain circumstances, and there isn't general solution or upstream didn't want to add the solution to its project:
cups-browsed
cups-browsed consumes large amount of CPU
Creating local printer queues takes long time for some printers with larger PPD file, so timeout of http connection will time out and it creates infinite loop of creating local printer queues. To solve this issue, please add
HttpLocalTimeout N HttpRemoteTimeout N
into /etc/cups/cups-browsed.conf, where 'N' is number of seconds after which connection is timed out. Then restart cups-browsed service. This option is currently in Fedora 27 and above.
[SINCE FEDORA 27] cups-browsed creates different printer queue names than before
This issue is connected to remote cups queues, which are advertised by older CUPS version (usually below cups-1.5, e.g. RHEL 6). Cups-browsed creates local print queues named by printer's DNS-SD ID by default and naming by remote cups queue is enabled again by adding:
LocalQueueNamingRemoteCUPS RemoteName
into /etc/cups/cups-browsed.conf and restart cups-browsed service.
CUPS
CUPS doesn't take nicely some kinds of FQDN
CUPS sometimes has problems with some kinds of FQDN - that means when you use FQDN in 'BrowsePoll' directive in /etc/cups/cups-browsed.conf, CUPS doesn't recognize it as valid hostname - it is solved by adding:
ServerAlias your.own.fully.qualified.hostname.com
into /etc/cups/client.conf and restarting cups service.
HPLIP
First I would like to mention that we are not responsible for support HPLIP, which is downloaded and installed from HP website. Please install hplip rpms from official Fedora repositories at most cases.
hp-plugin: file does not match its checksum. File may have been corrupted or altered
This common error is mostly caused by external causes (server outage, network outage), when wget tries to download plugin, but it returns only error message. It is connected with message:
Plugin download failed with error code = N
where N is return value of wget (man wget), which is used for downloading proprietary plugin. Solutions for this issue may vary - you can wait until servers go up again or try to install plugin, which you download manually from http://www.openprinting.org/download/printdriver/auxfiles/HP/plugins/ (select "Select and install an existing local copy of the plug-in file" during hp-setup or hp-plugin)
unable to load cupsext
This error can occur when hplip is installed from HP website, or its dependencies are mixed python2 and python3 packages or installed by pip. This is solved by removing all hplip packages (hplip, hplip-gui, hplip-libs, hplip-common, libsane-hpiao) and installing them again all from repositories.
missing hplip-gui
GUI tools and GUI parts of HP commands are moved to hplip-gui subpackage, because the main package can work without GUI, so the main package is smaller. The outcome of this decision is HP commands need to be run with '-i' option for interactive mode, or hplip-gui subpackage needs to be installed.
HP printer isn't discovered, doesn't print or doesn't print well
Some HP printers don't work well with URIs provided by CUPS (dnssd, usb, ipp) or they need proprietary plugin from HP, which cannot be in Fedora because of licensing issues. For such printers please try to run:
hp-setup -i
for interactive mode, or:
hp-setup
for graphic mode. This command installs HP printers and HP scanners. If you have issue about HP printer/HP scanner, which isn't discovered, doesn't print or doesn't print well, please try to install it by 'hp-setup', if it helps. If it doesn't help, please file a bugzilla and mention that you tried 'hp-setup'.