I already asked this question on FreeBSD forums, but nobody there seems to have any ideas, so I'll try here.

I've installed KDE 4.6.1 on FreeBSD 8.2 i386, using FreeBSD ports. I have an old HP Laserjet 6P printer connected via parallel port. CUPS 1.4.6 is installed, and applications such as Firefox and Libreoffice can successfully print to my printer. However, when I try to print from KDE applications such as Okular, KWrite or Konqueror, my printer is not even listed - only options are 'Print to PDF' and 'Print to Postscript'.

When I discovered this problem, I also noticed that there is nothing at all printing-related under KDE's system settings. I installed system-config-printer-kde4 port and this added the applet which shows me the existing printer and allows to configure it, but this printer still doesn't appear in KDE applications.

I've read suggestions that on FreeBSD replacing the lp* tools under /usr/bin with symlinks to corresponding CUPS binaries under /usr/local/bin might help, but in my case this doesn't seem to help. What else might I be missing?

Is CUPS support included in your Qt build?

Thanks for pointing this out, it seems likely that this is indeed the cause. I had neglected to set the QT4_OPTIONS=CUPS variable when building the qt4 ports on FreeBSD. I'll try rebuilding with this variable set and report back if this solves the problem.

I set QT4_OPTIONS=CUPS in /etc/make.conf and rebuilt the qt4-corelib and qt4-gui ports. That solved the problem. Also I removed the symlinks to various lp* tools that I had created in /usr/bin, looks like in this case they are not necessary.