Ubuntu – Ubuntu 18.04 LTS — Printing Service Not Available

18.04printingservices

My printer no longer shows up in my Settings -> Devices GUI menu. Instead it says "Sorry! The system printing service doesn't seem to be available."

I tried searching the 'net for ideas and I ran these terminal commands with the following output:

john@john-max:~$ sudo service cups restart
john@john-max:~$ systemctl status cups

● cups.service - CUPS Scheduler
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/cups.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: failed (Result: start-limit-hit) since Mon 2018-08-13 15:07:46 EDT; 14s ago
     Docs: man:cupsd(8)
  Process: 3314 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/cupsd -l (code=killed, signal=TERM)
 Main PID: 3314 (code=killed, signal=TERM)
Aug 13 15:07:46 john-max systemd[1]: cups.service: Service hold-off time over, scheduling restart.
Aug 13 15:07:46 john-max systemd[1]: cups.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 5.
Aug 13 15:07:46 john-max systemd[1]: Stopped CUPS Scheduler.
Aug 13 15:07:46 john-max systemd[1]: cups.service: Start request repeated too quickly.
Aug 13 15:07:46 john-max systemd[1]: cups.service: Failed with result 'start-limit-hit'.
Aug 13 15:07:46 john-max systemd[1]: Failed to start CUPS Scheduler.

john@john-max:~$ sudo apt-get install cups
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
cups is already the newest version (2.2.7-1ubuntu2.1).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

One thing which might matter: I recently opened Startup Applications and accidentally over-deleted some things there and don't know what they were. Maybe something for the printer service was in there?

I also tried re-installing my printer drivers for my printer but it just says already installed.

On Ubutnu Software as well as by running

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

I show my software as all up to date.

I'm fairly novice so if you tell me what to do, if possible, please give me the actual terminal command.

Best Answer

I had same problem. Config file is incorrectly located. Follow directions as per this link. https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/cups-service-stopped-um-18-04/17381

There is a default configuration file which should be installed in /usr/share/cups/cupsd.conf.default so I ran:

sudo cp /usr/share/cups/cupsd.conf.default /etc/cups/cupsd.conf
sudo service cups restart
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