# Can't get USB Printer to work



## x-com (Jun 28, 2014)

Hello Folks,

finally I made my way back to FreeBSD and ran into a problem. My printer is an Epson Stylus DX6000 connected via USB, which used to work with FreeBSD 8.2 and 9.1 using CUPS with libusb. Now I realize, that ulpt is the problem. On the former versions of FreeBSD one simply modified /etc/devfs.rules according to the documentation but now you have to detach ulpt in order to use CUPS and libusb.
This is there my question starts, it contains of multiple parts and I am not sure whether this part of the forum is right, so sorry if it is the wrong subforum in advance.

1) Is there a way to disable ulpt without recompiling the kernel? Let's say like blacklisting modules under Linux.

2) I have tried to recompile the kernel and added the following to /etc/make.conf:

```
WITHOUT_MODULES= ulpt
```
but it simply didn't work. I changed this line, after research on the internet, to

```
WITHOUT_MODULES= usb/ulpt
```
but this doesn't work either. What am I doing wrong here?


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## wblock@ (Jun 28, 2014)

Many people use CUPS with USB printers on FreeBSD 10.  As far as I know, the USB system is the same on FreeBSD 9 and 10.

You may be looking at old instructions.

What is the problem?


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## x-com (Jun 28, 2014)

Hi, thanks for your response. The problem is that ulpt is blocking cups with libusb from "seeing" the usb device. The ports-message from print/cups-base tells that ulpt must not be attached to the device (we're talking about actual ports, the portsnap was this morning). So I'm searching for a way to get rid of ulpt. At the moment I'm using a rather odd approach, I simply moved the ulpt.ko from /boot/kernel/ to a temporary directory, so it won't get loaded but this is nothing one should do permanently. On the other hand, the printer is working. But I got a bad feeling about this "solution".


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## wblock@ (Jun 28, 2014)

The native USB system is supposed to provide libusb.  Did you build print/cups-base with the default options (LIBUSB off) and try it?


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## x-com (Jun 29, 2014)

Well, well, that was too obvious. Thanks for the tip wblock@. It's working! No I don't need that "solution" any more. But there are two things that puzzle me:

Why isn't that mentioned somewhere? Neither the port-message nor the websites I've seen do mention this. There is some lack of documentation here.
Why didn't that kernel config work? This may be another question, but it is some kind of confusing.

But anyway thanks again to @wblock@!
Now my FreeBSD workstation is up and running.  :beergrin


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