[PRINTER] Ippusbxd Default Queue Disables Local Printer

[Frazer]

I have recently upgraded a group of pool laptops and low-demand local servers to 20.04LTS and immediately struck a problem with the local USB printers that we use on the servers. No matter what combination of setup procedures I tried, the installed printer would indicate unavailable. The system would detect it fine and install the correct drivers but it would always appear to be offline. I traced the problem eventually to ippusbxd. This appears to be pre-configuring a local USB print queue during the installation process, irrespective of whether there is a local printer installed or not. Any further attempt to install a local USB printer immediately meets the same problem. I thought that it was HPLIP initially as the printer is an HP Envy 5020 which the HPLIP site claims to not support (it does) and then it looked like CUPS. In the end the only solution was to purge ippusbxd completely, which doesn't seem to be causing the system any problems otherwise.

Has anyone else observed this behaviour and does it point to a bug somewhere? I have seen a lot of posts around various forums regarding print problems in 20.04 and I think this may be the culprit in some.

[claydoh]

This has been mentioned a few times here.
It does not seem to effect the majority of users, but just enough of them to make it stick out a little.
This program allows any printer that supports the protocol (most seem to) to be used as a network printer via USB, which is a driverless setup, which theoretically allows for a much more broad support of printers ootb.
It worked for me on my ancient HP and my new Canon el-cheapo $30 printer, though that one I connect via wireless anyway.

[Frazer]

Thanks for your reply but the link appears to be broken. The machines I had problems on were all clean builds with no extraneous junk and the problem was consistent and reproducible across multiple machines so surprising that this didn't show in beta. If this has affected others then it has the potential to be an ongoing problem and I did see one post from someone who was pretty angry. Are you aware if this is being investigated at all?

[claydoh]

In terms of this particular forum, i am probably the one who first 'discovered' the fix.
That bad link was just a to search results here on the forum for 'Ippusbxd'.
Here is one that might work better. I guess search result urls on the forum itself seem to be tied to the user.
20.04 is now over a year old, and I think the addition of Ippusbxd came before Focal. Issues did pop up just after 20.04 release day on various *buntu related places in the 'net but seems to have become a less common topic in recent months.This is something on ubuntu's hands, as Kubuntu does not touch anything related to drivers, mostly.
There are almost no bug reports to ubuntu on it, which does not mean much since people don't care for posting reports there, but ippusbxd's github has plenty.
It looks to have been replaced with something else post-20.04 (ipp-usb)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...b/+bug/1891157
So, yeah, it has been investigated, and dealt with. Just can't do much for 20.04, as the problems did not seem to be noticed during testing, and they really can't remove something that would probably break as many (if not more) setups than it would fix.