Problem encountered was with the mind mapping application Freeplane, it would not print on a 64 bit version of Mint LMDE.

The printers were listed in the print dialog but there was no output.

Running Freeplane from a terminal showed errors relating to gnome keyring. the fixes and workround for that are  described here

Tests with simple java exhibited the same problem. But no sign of any error messages.

Final solution was found here at the howto forge. In short install cups-bsd.