I'm on 16.04. Until recently I could print just fine. Something has broken cups and I'm not sure what.
When I go to System Settings-> Printers, it says "Printing service is not available. Start the service on this computer or connect to another server."
Cups was masked for some reason. I didn't mask it. I tried unmasking it and starting it. Now systemctl says that cups is running, but I still can't print anything. System Settings-> Printers still thinks it's not running.
I unmasked any cups service that had been masked. Tried enabling them all and rebooting. Still no luck.
I've made sure that cups is set to just complain in apparmor.
Any ideas? I have no clue why my pc decided not to print anymore.
Best Answer
if you look to see which version of cups you have installed;
there have been issues in the last few weeks with a cups update that went "belly-up":
If you paste this command
dpkg -l cups*have a look to see which version you have; it seems cups2.1.3-4ubuntu0.2 is the problem; if you just have 2.1.3-4ubuntu then that seems ok
on the Mint forum; (ubuntu lookalike) https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=242497&start=40
if you count down to post #9, houchou has a solution: it worked for him and others; we can only point you to that;