Printer pauses randomly after upgrade to 16.04

Guys I think I found the cause. When I booted into a Live System my printer worked fine (Samsung ML-1640), also on a fresh installed system (16.04, 16.10, 17.04 Beta). I’ve made a postinstall script a while ago for the installation of some software and themes and after running it my printer get randomly paused. So I decided to reinstall Ubuntu and then install every single program one after another with reboots between and tried to print something.

To cut a long story short, it seems to be tlp. Have you guys installed it? If so try to remove it with:

sudo apt purge tlp tlp-rdw

and reboot. After that your printer should work as expected, at least mine is. I hope this solves the issue for you, it was really annoying that the printer wasn’t working as he should.

You can still use tlp but you have to deactivate USB-autosuspend or add your printer ID to the blacklist. To add the printer ID do the following:

  1. connect your printer to your computer
  2. open a terminal
  3. get the printer ID with ‘lsusb’ (should look like this: Bus 003 Device 052: ID 04e8:3292 Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd ML-1640 Series Laser Printer)
  4. open the config file with a texteditor (pluma, gedit, nano etc.) ‘sudo pluma /etc/default/tlp’
  5. scroll to line 178 or search for ‘#USB_BLACKLIST=’
  6. remove the # and the numbers between the " and add your printer ID there (should look like this: USB_BLACKLIST=“04e8:3292”)
  7. save the file and reboot
  8. your printer should work again

http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-configuration.html#usb

I filed a bug report here

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