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I have a laser printer (Samsung ML-2010) that is in good condition, it works in Windows and old linuxes, but not with my fresh installation of ArchLinux. The printer is recognised and configured, but not printing, saying about any job:

canceled at
Fri 06 Jun 2014 10:15:26 PM EEST 
"Filter failed"

The question is -- where to look at to find more? Cups logs don't seem to have anything related.

Illarion Kovalchuk
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10 Answers10

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For Ubuntu 14.04 users (and maybe others) you cannot add the foomatic-filters as suggested above, as they conflict with the CUPS project's version (cups-filters).

The hint may be in /var/log/cups/error_log. In my case, the output looks like this

[17/Aug/2014:12:47:31 +1000] [Job 83] JCL: 12345X@PJL 
[17/Aug/2014:12:47:31 +1000] [Job 83] <job data> 
[17/Aug/2014:12:47:31 +1000] [Job 83] sh: 1: hpijs: not found 
[17/Aug/2014:12:47:31 +1000] [Job 83] GPL Ghostscript 9.10: Can't start ijs server "hpijs" 
[17/Aug/2014:12:47:31 +1000] [Job 83] renderer exited with status 1 
[17/Aug/2014:12:47:31 +1000] [Job 83] Possible error on renderer command line or PostScript error. Check options.Kid3 exit status: 3

It can be solved with:

sudo apt-get install hpijs-ppds printer-driver-hpijs

Not sure if both are needed, I just picked all hpijs-like things in Aptitude.

masegaloeh
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Greg Bell
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  • This advice is very helpful in my case. I ran into the same problem but the actual reason, which I figured from the log, is that I accidentally uninstalled `ghostscript`. – qweruiop Nov 30 '15 at 20:05
  • Thanks, my log gave me the answer, I was trying to print only 2 pages of 20, reversed and only even pages. But it didn't like that for some reason and gave me the filter failed. I didn't realize that selecting options like reverse, odd pages or a range were considered filters. – Elijah Lynn Mar 05 '17 at 19:10
  • This worked for myself also, for a different printer (Lexmark E120n), where CUPS also suggested configuring it to use hpijs. – Pathogen Apr 09 '20 at 22:23
  • On more recent systems it might be `journalctl -u cups -e`. – akostadinov Mar 25 '21 at 09:14
  • Worked for me on Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS. Much simpler than the steps that hp-check -t said were needed, or anything about ghostprint versions and downgrading stuff. – jla Feb 15 '22 at 04:28
5

Since this is a top hit on Google for "debian jessie filter failed" I'm going to add what helped for me.

This is for Debian Jessie and CUPS failing with "filter failed"!

The culprit was the ghostscript package from stable (i.e. Jessie in this case) which crashes a lot. I upgraded to the ghostscript package from testing.

Erik Winkels
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4

For the benefit of anyone seeing this error message in 2019, a possible cause is an incompatibility between older versions of cups-filters and recent versions of ghostscript. Upgrading the former or downgrading the latter resolves the issue.

Note that upgrades to cups-filters were not released for some platforms (e.g. Raspbian Stretch on the Raspberry Pi) until mid-June 2019, so if this did not work in the past try sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade again.

Skyviewer
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davidar
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Try installing foomatic-filters and foomatic-db-engine from AUR.

Janne Pikkarainen
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1

I had the same problem on Debian Jessie!
The tip of Erik Winkels solved the problem.

I modificated the /etc/apt/sources.list
- Added the line: deb http://ftp.at.debian.org/debian/ sid main

Then I followed the steps:
- sudo aptitude update
- sudo aptitude safe-upgrade ghostscript
- Revert the sources.list, and again:
- sudo aptitude update

Now my ghostscript is in Version 9.19~dfsg-3, and printing works.

PaulK.
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I had a similar "Filter failed" error message with a HP CP1217 printer, the steps on this page (https://ramblingmoose.wordpress.com/2018/04/18/debian-and-raspbian-installing-a-cups-print-server-and-a-proprietary-p1102w-print-driver-on-linux/) helped me, I'll quote the relevant bit:

I ran in terminal: sudo hp-setup -i

For installing plug-in the prompts I answered were

  • 0 (zero) for USB printer
  • d for download – download had error "Unable to receive key from Keyserver"
  • y to install Yes to accept the EULA
  • y to agree that "this PPD file appears to be the correct one"
  • Enter a location description
  • Entered through "additional information for this printer"
  • y to print a test page
John Leonard
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In my case (HP Laserjet CP1215) the right printer driver was missing => foo2hp

You can install it with: sudo apt-get install printer-driver-foo2zjs-common

Also restart CUPS: sudo service cups restart

leon22
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I have a raspberry pi an in my case this was due to my rootfs being full.

Test if this is the case for you with df -h and cleanup you file system if necessary.

Use sudo ncdu -x / to find the folder that's eating up all that space, again, if this is the case for you.

victmo
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For users of the Raspberry Pi and possibly certain other Debian-based platforms that experienced this issue in May-June 2019, the problem was that ghostscript and libgs9 were upgraded two or three weeks before the upgraded versions of cups-browsed, cups-filters, cups-filters-core-drivers, libcupsfilters1, and libfontembed1 were made available in the Raspbian repos. Running sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade again on or after June 14, 2019 should hopefully fix the problem.

Skyviewer
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I just solved a problem very similar to this. It was caused by the spring 2019 Debian upgrade. To solve it, I added "oldstable" to my Debian sources.list and then I was able to downgrade several packages. I downgraded:

  • printer-driver-hpcups to 3.16.11+repack0-3
  • ghostscript, ghostsctipt-x, libgs9, libgs9-common to 9.26a~dfsg-0+deb9u2
Liam Morland
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