# Printer in Mate not working!



## fvs (Sep 13, 2016)

I have a FreeBSD Mate desktop, most everything is working very well except I'm having trouble with my printer, I have followed the FreeBSD handbook and have installed CUPS which has recognized and installed my Epson NX 430 printer, however when I go to print I get an error message

```
Could not start printer.
Please check your printer configuration
```
.
The other thing is Mate in the control panel doesn't show a printer icon or when I search it doesn't have it listed?  Need help.


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## cpm@ (Sep 14, 2016)

Check that you have installed print/system-config-printer port.


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## fvs (Sep 14, 2016)

No I haven't, Just installed now, Whats next?
I get this message
Unable to print test page:

    No such file or directory


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## shepper (Sep 14, 2016)

fvs said:


> I have followed the FreeBSD handbook and have installed CUPS which has recognized and installed my Epson NX 430 printer, however when I go to print I get an error message



There are 3 different printing systems available in FreeBSD:
1)  LPD which comes with the base install
2)  print/cups  which is the default in the Linux world.  Most desktops with print wizards integrate with cups. HP's print/hplip is cups based.
3)  sysutils/LPRng

The Handbook addresses the first one, LPD.



> *9.6.1. CUPS (Common UNIX® Printing System)*





> CUPS is a popular printing system available on many operating systems. Using CUPS on FreeBSD is documented in a separate article:../../../../doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/cups


.
You will have a configuration mess if you mix LPD and CUPS.


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## fvs (Sep 14, 2016)

OK went back and removed # all lines in my files that reference LPD, I just have Cups file references.
It still don't work?


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## shepper (Sep 14, 2016)

In the Cups on FreeBSD link I posted above there is a section on troubleshooting.  Did you go through it?  If you did and are still having trouble you will have to post back with some specifics (cups logs, hardware and *ppd used) for anyone to help you.


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## scottro (Sep 14, 2016)

Did you install cups-filter?  This sometimes fixes the problem. (After installing it, run `service cupsd restart`.  You can check /var/log/cups/error_log.  If it has something like

```
Returning IPP client-error-document-format-not-supported for Print-Job
```
 that particular error is almost always fixed installing the cups-filter package.


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## cpm@ (Sep 14, 2016)

system-config-printer is a printer administration tool which first appeared in Fedora and later in Debian and Ubuntu. The purpose of the tool is to configure a CUPS server (often the local machine) using the CUPS API. The tool is written in Python, using pygtk for the graphical parts and with some Python bindings (pycups) for the CUPS API.

It is largely the same as using the CUPS web interface for configuring printers, but has the advantage of being a native application rather than a web page.

http://cyberelk.net/tim/software/system-config-printer/

PS: For configuring the printers, MATE Desktop users normally use it.


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