kde: Openoffice doesn't see remote cups printers, just generic printer

[Simon Oosthoek]

I have two pc's on a LAN, one is running mandriva 2006 with cups, sharing the printer on the LAN.
kprinter can see the printers without problems, but openoffice only shows the generic printer, which doesn't seem to be available when printing to it.
I can print to file, which I can then print using kprinter on the same machine running edgy.

I believe the normal thing would be that openoffice shows the printers available via the CUPS system on the network next to the generic printer.

[Simon Oosthoek (simon-margo)]

I forgot to mention, I'm running edgy64 on amd64 hardware.

[Luka Renko (lure)]

Confirmed on up-to-date Edgy i386.

[Simon Oosthoek (simon-margo)]

It seems that it's not openoffice, but cups itself that is configured not to show network printers.

changing the browsing option in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf will correct this (at least, for me)

before: Browsing Off
after: Browsing On

I don't understand why this is configured this way by default, since this is confusing as hell, while cups is supposed to make things easier.

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

reassign to cupsys; maybe turn on Browsing by default? apparently kprinter already does this.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Probably default configurations were simply left how Debian made them.

What I did when I was at Mandriva was enabling Browsing for remote printers and Broadcasting local printers by default. So the users of small network simply set up a printer on an arbitrary machine and have it available on all machines. So the configuration works out of the box for unexperienced users.

In bigger networks where one wants to select which printer is available where there is usually a system administrator who changes the configuration in the desired way.

So I think it is best to have browsing and broadcasting on by default. The default configuration should address best the unexperienced user, as the experts will change it to their needs anyway. The unexperienced user calls the support or reports a bug as he does not know that this system behavior is configurable and how to configure it.

Strange here is that kprinter sees the remote printer and OpenOffice.org not. I assume that both use the CUPS API (I know that kprinter uses it) and so they should list the same printers.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

I talked with Martin Pitt about this issue on IRC and he tells that if Browsing/Broadcasting is on by default users could see printers in the application's print dialog whose location is not known to them and they could accidentally print to such unknown printers.

You can turn on Browsing and broadcasting via the "Global Settings" menu in the gnome-cups-manager (Desktop menu: System -> Preferences).

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Simon Oosthoek, is your kprinter/KDE Print in the default configuration? Or did you choose another CUPS server than localhost in its configuration?

[Simon Oosthoek (simon-margo)]

Probably the kprinter configuration was set to connect to a specific server or this was carried over from older KDE settings. It's a bit hard to check now, because I've moved house since then and my network has changed quite a bit.

[Nathaniel B. Jayme (nbjayme)]

I am using Dapper.

I don't know if the same bug exist in new release of Ubuntu.
But it seems openoffice does not refresh it's list of printers even if cups do.

You need to close all openoffice instance and load again to get the list from cups.
This should be fixed it's one annoying bug.

NBJayme

[hencke (hencke)]

I just did a fresh kubuntu 7.10 (i386) install and added a networkprinter from KMenu->System Settings->Printers. (I set protocol to TCP as the printer has a static address in our home network.) After doing this I was able to print (and Mail to PDF, Print to File (PDF&Postscript) and Send to Fax) from at least Kate, KPDF and Gwenview, but in OpenOffice.org (OOo) applications none of these options were available. Also information about Description and Location were not available.

As suggested by Simon, after changing "Browsing Off" to "Browsing On" in "/etc/cups/cupsd.conf" I can now print from OOo applications. The other options (Mail to PDF, Print to File (PDF&Postscript) and Send to Fax as well as the information about Description and Location) are still not available, but this is not a problem for me.

I can't remember having this problem with ubuntu 7.04 and although the fix is easy (for us), it won't be easy for a new user!

Anyway the real issue seems to be something related to how OOo applications (and possibly Firefox) access information about printers in KDE, which seems different to how KDE applications work.

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

Hardy has reached end of life, and this package is not present in later releases. Closing all related bugs.