CUPS had me chasing around for a while to fix this issue. Whenever I tried to print I realized there were no printers and going to "System -> Administration -> Printing" caused the error "There was an error during the CUPS operation: 'httpConnectionEncrypt failed'" when I tried to connect to the local CUPS service. The "/etc/init.d/cups" file had completely disappeared and reinstalling the cups package didn't fix it! In the end I marked the cups package for "complete removal" which also removes the configuration files. After this I then reinstalled CUPS, "/etc/init.d/cups" reappeared and it worked once again. Unfortunately I had to reinstall my printers on this machine.
Steps were:
- Complete removal of CUPS package including the configuration files
- Reinstall the CUPS package.
- Start the CUPS service with "sudo /etc/init.d/cups restart" in the terminal.
- Reinstall your printers
- Print stuff!
Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala CUPS