333990 - File->Page Setup does nothing, File->Print generates error dialog "Printer Error. An unknown error occurred while printing."

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[Glen Hoag]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.0.2) Gecko/20060328 Firefox/1.5.0.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.0.2) Gecko/20060328 Firefox/1.5.0.2

Cannot print at all after automatic update to 1.5.0.2.  To see if it was an error in the update, I downloaded the full package with the same result.

OS is Mac OS X 10.4.5 (8H14)
Machine is Mac Mini (PPC)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Launch Firefox
2. Open any web page (http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/) for instance.
3. File->Print

Actual Results:  
Error dialog appears as in summary.

Expected Results:  
Print dialog, then paper from printer.

Comment 1

[Glen Hoag]

Restart of Mac OS fixes the issue.  Odd, because other applications, such as Eudora, continued to print before restart.  However, this problem affected both Safari 2.0.3 (417.9.2) and Camino 2005042806 (0.8.4).

So, it appears that the installation process may be doing something funny to the Mac OS X print subsystem.

Downgrading severity to Minor, since a restart fixes it.

Comment 2

[philippe (part-time)]

I have a similar problem in bug 333926, but it only affects the latest Camino trunk builds.

And unfortunately, a restart of the computer didn't solve it on my side.

Comment 3

[Adam Guthrie]

What sort of printer do you have, Glen? Is it an HP Laserjet 8150? The fact that this happened with Safari (a non-Gecko browser) makes me think it might be a problem with the printer, which would make this a dupe of bug 313062.

Comment 4

[David Chaiken]

I ran into exactly this behavior.  Killing cupsd (which causes an automatic
restart of cupsd) stopped the error dialog, allows File->Page Setup to work,
and allows File->Print to bring up a dialog box.

After killing cups, restarting printing services as follows fixed the problem:

  sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/PrintingServices/PrintingServices restart

It's possible that this command would have fixed the problem without
explicitly killing cups, but I can't reproduce this bug.

One final note: this bug triggered after switching between a variety of
networks: wireless/encrypted, wireless/open, wired.  Not sure if this
movement is correlated with the bug.

Bottom line: I was definitely able to recover from this issue without
restarting Mac OS X.  It's likely that this recipe will work for others.

Comment 5

[tallison]

The problem has reoccurred for 3.0.1.  This currently affects two computers, both mac books.  The printers are on a CUPS server.  MS Word and OpenOffice are able to print this successfully.  Firefox is a dud.  No further errors are available.  Is there a debug mode that can be used?

Reinstalling FireFox does not help.

Creating a new user does not help.

Comment 6

[Doug MacBean]

Every time I try to use my Brother laser printer, I get an "error" message, when on line with Firefox. Same thing for my Photoshop. Not sure about other programs, too scared to try. Must do my Utility app. to get back to normal operations.

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Do you still see this problem with firefox 3.6?

Glenn, see question in comment 2.

(reporter's addresses is dead)

Comment 8

[Glen Hoag]

Do you mean the question in comment 3?  I don't remember what printer I was using five years ago when I reported this; it was either a LaserJet 4ML via AppleTalk (with an antique EtherTalk to LocalTalk bridge) or a LaserJet 1200 via USB.

I'm no longer using the PPC version of Firefox, having migrated to MacOS on Intel a few years back.  Printing seems to work fine at the moment.

Comment 9

[David Chaiken]

I haven't seen the problem reported in comment 4 for at least a year.

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks. WFM then.  (I can't imagine this would be ppc specific)