Had a friend send me this little gem that had them perplexed for a while. Eventually they figured it out.
The problem is the command line interface tool "lpq" and "lprm" were throwing the following errors:
user@ubuntu# lpq lpq: lp: cannot chdir to spooling directory user@ubuntu# lprm lprm: lp: cannot chdir to spooling directory
The confusing part is lpr, lpq, lprm and lpstat are all part of the "lpr" Ubuntu package. You can verify your install using "dpkg --get-selections | grep lpr". What we needed was the exact same lpr, lpq, lprm and lpstat binaries which are made to work with CUPSd.
user@ubuntu# sudo apt-get install cups-bsd The following extra packages will be installed: libfile-copy-recursive-perl update-inetd The following packages will be REMOVED: lpr The following NEW packages will be installed: cups-bsd libfile-copy-recursive-perl update-inetd 0 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
As you can see the old "lpr" package was removed and cups-bsd was installed. cups-bsd replaces the binaries lpr, lpq, lprm and lpstat and works with CUPSd. Now using lpq works as expected with the previously configured cups printers.
user@ubuntu:~# lpq printer is ready no entries
