And... the only reason I got a working printer is I made myself a member of the 'sys' group otherwise creation of /etc/cups/printer.conf would have failed due to lack of permission. Since I was a member of the sys group, permission for cups operation was satisfied, however, apparently printer driver generation with the 'foomatic-db-generation' package uses another scheme prompting the error. How to solve for a normal user?
I believe users have to be a member of the lp group. Perhaps that is the root cause of the problems?
Darrell