An update on my problems installing cups. This just covers the hilights of sorting out the problems, and my writeup will be specific to the problems on my particular setup.
I got the various components of the cups daemon to install by manually either reinstalling or copying files to where they needed to be to let the installation continue. So eventually got success with : # systemctl start cups.service I'm running xfce as a windows manager, and to print I used samba to print via a networked printer on a Windows7 machine. I tried using the cups daemon to print simple text files, and also used smbclient to try to verify that the networked part of the system was working properly. I'd set up the windows smb share using firefox. Although samba allowed me to login to my windows shares, when I tried to print I got various messages including NT_STATUS_BAD_NETWORK_NAME I'd guess that is progress compared to NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE Fortunately I had a copy of /etc/cups/printer.conf from a backup made before the system crashed a couple of months ago, and I knew it worked. The relevant code is DeviceURI smb://192.168.1.3/HP%20Deskjet%201510%20series something different from the tidy writeups on web pages explaining how these things work. I also noted that the printer ppds offered by cups+gutenprint a) had no close match to my printer, and b) were different from the codes identified by the printer.conf file. I dumped cups+gutenprint, installed the foomatic ppd's and set up a new printer with the new drivers. Still no success, but the error messages were a little cleaner. I was getting : cups filter failed - can't detect file type. I figured it was time to try printing a .pdf file, and installed cups-pdf. This is a dummy transitional package that should have set up a new PDF printer. The .pdf files are the basic files that cups uses, so file detection was less likely to be a problem. This time I loaded up a .pdf file in gimp, and printed the file. No success, but the error messages said that libqpdf was a problem. I installed libqpdf13. This time when the file print instruction was activated in gimp, a window popped up asking for a username and password. Success! Well, success for .pdf files. Txt files still would not print, but at least the problem was narrowed down to getting a username and password off over the network to the windows share. I'd noted that in the Applications Menu the "print settings" used to bring up a printer management program, and months ago, when files did not print straightaway, I could select the job in the printer queue and authenticate it. The application is called system-config-printer I reinstalled this, reinstalled it python dependencies, and finally python-pycurl. "print-settings" now opens up the printer app. I could see the print queue, and authenticate the held files in the drop-down menu. This brings up a login window, one per file, but it works. Finally.
