cups-pdf don't work

[murgen]

cups-pdf don't work, when you print the first time it create a PDF directory in user home directory but don't create any pdf file anytime.

[Paul Hayward (silkstone)]

Problem has been reported by several users. This appears to affect Ubuntu-eee only (Array kernel).

[Paul Hayward (silkstone)]

Ubuntu-eee 8.04.1

Printing to CUPS-PDF should generate a .pdf file in ~/PDF. Although the file creation seems to take place and a dialogue appears on screen to show its progress, the file does not exist in ~/PDF or anywhere else.

/var/log/cups/cups-pdf_log reports an error along the lines of...

Fri Dec 5 12:15:15 2008 [ERROR] failed to set file mode for PDF file (non fatal) (/home/silkstone/PDF/242_Index_page.pdf)

This is caused by chmod failing to act on a file which should be there but does not exist. There is no error message regarding the actual non-creation of the file.

The problem has been reported by users on the Ubuntu and Ubuntu-eee forums, and seems to be specific to Ubuntu-eee (8.04.1) - perhaps the Array kernel. The standard Ubuntu 8.04 behaves as expected. There are no obvious differences between cups-pdf.conf files in Ubuntu-eee and the standard Ubuntu Hardy.

[emmonsjb (emmons)]

I'm getting this problem as well. And I don't think we're the only ones: https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu-eee/+question/45161

See also the Ubuntu-EEE Forums: http://www.ubuntu-eee.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=31&start=0&st=0&sk=t&sd=a
...and Ubuntu Forums: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1002296

[Paul Hayward (silkstone)]

I've changed the status to Confirmed as we seem to have enough evidence of the problem now.

[emmonsjb (emmons)]

I've found that if you open a document as root--in my case, it was gksudo nautilus, then double-clicking to open an OpenOffice file--and then print, it creates a PDF directory under /home/root/ and prints the PDF to that directory.

So in summary, if you open a file as root, it'll print to PDF under root's PDF folder.

[Paul Hayward (silkstone)]

Thanks to zeemor on the Ubuntu-eee forums for finding a fix to this.

The problem is caused by permissions in /var/tmp when Ghostscript tries to use a file there.

The solution is to give full permissions for everyone in /var/tmp.