Yesterday I needed to write a letter in Abiword. I sent it to the printer, it went into the queue but it never came out the other end! The CUPS error log said:

C [19/Nov/2008:13:42:27 +0000] [Job 87] undefined in get
E [19/Nov/2008:13:42:28 +0000] PID 5946 (/usr/lib/cups/filter/foomatic-rip) stopped with status 1!

Whatever that means! Fortunately I was able to get the thing printed by exporting it as a pdf and printing it out of Evince.

I googled a bit and found the suggestion that I change the reporting level in /etc/cupsd.conf to debug and try again. So I did. I opened Abiword, loaded the very same file and sent it to print, hoping to get a full debug listing of what was going wrong. And what do you know! It printed out without any problems.

Can anyone tell me what is going on here?