When adding network printer wizard chooses wrong subnet for scanning

[Philipp Wollermann]

Binary package hint: kdeprint

When adding a network printer (TCP) with the kdeprint wizard, the wizard offers to scan for printers in the network. It chooses the wrong subnet however, and wants to scan 127.0.1.* and not 192.168.178.* which is the real address of my LAN. I have to enter the correct address in "Settings" but when I try to scan, it warns me that:

"You are about to scan a subnet (192.168.178.*) that does not correspond to the current subnet of this computer (127.0.1.*). Do you want to scan the specified subnet anyway?"

Scanning works then and the printer is found.

[Sarah Kowalik (hobbsee-deactivatedaccount)]

I can confirm this. I'm not sure if this is supposed to work this way, or if it's supposed to look for the correct subnet, then scan.

[Sarah Kowalik (hobbsee-deactivatedaccount)]

Wishlisting, as we cant really scan every single subnet, to see which exists on the LAN.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

According to the initial report this is not a bug in system-config-printer-kde but really in kdebase. The network scanning facility mentioned is a part of the KDE Printing Manager. system-config-printer (both KDE and GNOME) asks CUPS for available printers and so the CUPS backends do the network scan in a much faster and efficient way (via SNMP and Bonjour/Zeroconf) and they find always the LAN and do not get stuck in the loopback device.

The KDE Printing Manager is not maintained any more upstream and removed from KDE 4.x on, so it does not appear any more in Intrepid. Therefore we will not do any usability improvements on this software any more.

system-config-printer (at least the GTK/GNOME version) turned to be a de-facto standard. It is currently used in Ubuntu, Fedora/Red Hat, and Mandriva Linux. So the latest and greatest in terms of printer management and GUI for new CUPS-internal functionality usually goes into system-config-printer and therefore this is the recommended printer setup tool.

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

Marking Won't Fix since, as mentioned before, the KDE Print Manager/KPrinter has been discontinued upstream.