Recently I've lost way too much time trying to figure out why Java Print services was not working on one of my Ubuntu machines.

When I tried to print from a Java application the spool never showed up in CUPS. There was no exception in Java and there was no trace in the CUPS logs.

After a lot of trial and error I was able to fix the situation by installing the cups-bsd package:
sudo aptitude install cups-bsd


Worth remembering...