When installing a new printer using the CUPS web interface, instead of displaying the list of drivers only the messageUnable to get list of printer drivers:Successis displayed. No printers can be added.Question: What is the problem here? Searching the internet gives several reports of the problem but it is difficult to find a solution.More information:Also adding printers via other GUIs communicating with CUPS does not work.Furthermore, runninglpinfo -mprints after some timelpinfo: successinstead of a driver list, and running/usr/lib/cups/driver/foomatic listtakes very long time on CPU usage.
CUPS: Adding printer fails with Unable to get list of printer drivers: Success
printing;cups
This bug triggers as an interaction between gutenprint, foomatic and cups.Quick workaround:Remove gutenprint,or: Remove the package providing /usr/lib/cups/driver/foomatic (which is foomatic-db-engine on Arch Linux),or: Manually remove the files /usr/share/foomatic/db/source/driver/gutenprint-ijs*.xml.More in depth:There is an informative discussion of this problem [already here], so I provide just a summary:gutenprint installs two comparably big XML files, namely /usr/share/foomatic/db/source/driver/gutenprint-ijs-simplified.5.2.xml and /usr/share/foomatic/db/source/driver/gutenprint-ijs.5.2.xml (as in the current version as of this writing).foomatic or one of it's sub-packages (foomatic-db-engine in Arch Linux) install the perl script /usr/lib/cups/driver/foomatic.When CUPS tries to get a list of printer drivers, /usr/lib/cups/driver/foomatic list is called, which takes way too long time on the big XML files (this is a fault of /usr/lib/cups/driver/foomatic). Eventually, it might finish, but CUPS times out earlier without having got any information about printer drivers and produces this strange Success-error. Since it did not get information about printer drivers, it is not possible to add printers via any interface to CUPS other than manually editing configuration files.So, as long as /usr/lib/cups/driver/foomatic is not fixed to be quicker on big files, probably the best workaround is, if one wants to have both gutenprint and a full foomatic-install, to manually remove the two big XML files provided by gutenprint. (Increasing the timeout in CUPS would not be good since one could wait for hours.)For Arch Linux, if one builds the package locally (e.g. via the Arch Build System, or by installing with yaourt and having customizepkg set up), one can apply the following patch to the PKGBUILD of gutenprint in order to have the modification within the package:--- PKGBUILD.old        2016-04-14 18:13:15.000000000 +0200+++ PKGBUILD.new        2016-04-14 18:41:47.000000000 +0200@@ -47,5 +47,8 @@ package() {   cd ${pkgname}-${pkgver}   make DESTDIR=${pkgdir} install++  # The following line was added by ''customizepkg-scripting'', script ''$0'', in order to work around the bug described at https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/47718+  rm -fv ${pkgdir}/usr/share/foomatic/db/source/driver/gutenprint-ijs*.xml }