Next day, she tries to print something out. Nothing happens. Printer silent; no error messages. I have a look... Mozilla and OpenOffice silently fail when printing, and nothing happens. BUT, printing to a file (PDF), then printing from command line or from xpdf *does* work. Had a fiddle with settings in OO, but no luck. Not enough time to sort it out.
Last night she was doing more work. This time I was determined to get it sorted out (she makes a rude comment about Linux in comparison with Windows every time something like this happens). I fiddled with CUPS, and redhat-config-printer (using RH 9 here). CUPS would print out its test page, and CLI worked, but my fiddling had now stopped xpdf from being able to print out. Fortunately, xpdf had an "lpr: could not create temporary file" error message on the terminal. A quick strace -f later showed that the problem was the permissions of the /var/tmp directory. It was 755. A quick chmod 777 (I know, I know, but I was in a hurry and didn't want to RTFM for the t bit), and it all was working again, from all applications.
Good luck to any newbie trying to sort that problem out. It's a problem that should never have occurred in the first place. Grrr.
Cheers, Carl.
