Unable to rename a printer

[Anonymous]

> Hi all,
> I am not a member of the mailing list yet, please include me
> in the reply.

Being the IT professional you are, you should also know that this gives extra work for people who are trying to help you for free. You should try to make the help you need as effortless as possible for the ones who donate to you their own precious time.

So, no! I won't include you in "CC:". And it is not because I dont even know your email. After all, I could as well google for it. Or phone the Novell receptionist in Utah or Boston to find it out...

> I am working on gnome-cups-manager, GUI tool for printer management
> for gnome desktop on Linux.

Uhmmm... so it will not work for the Gnome desktop on Solaris?? That is a pity, because that is what I will be using most of the time.

Still, from what you asked you have been assigned a daunting task! Gnome printing lacks so much (if compared to KDE, or Windows, or OS X) that it is very disencouraging to even try and use it.

But I am glad that Gnome finally tries to make up for some of the competitive edge that KDE has in all printing matters. KDE started their development for professional printing needs already 3 years ago..... I hope you can copy and mimic their fabulous gains within a year or two.

However, you are well advised to permanently subscribe to this (and the more elementary level "cups-general") mailing list. Because from how you ask it is pretty clear that you will have many, many, many more beginner's questions.

> I wanted to know if there is any way I can change the printer name?

You should maybe try to contact one of your newly acquired SUSE colleagues. They are located in Nuremburg/Germany, IIRC. I am sure that  they know about all the basic and most of the advanced features of CUPS. They probably are more than willing to get you up to speed. They can easily tell you that you can not rename a printer queue in CUPS by one single, simple operation.

> As of now, I found no way through CUPS to change the printer name.
> Looks like cups is not supporting it, I am not sure.

That's correct. And there are reasons for this.

> However, this operation
> is like changing printer attributes like name, description, location
> etc, which seems very basic operations.

No, it is not.

> Can any of you please clarify me on this issue, if this operation is
> supported, how to go about it?

## Stop the old queue:
   /usr/bin/disable oldquene
   /usr/sbin/reject oldqueue

## Create a new printer queue with the same settings as the old one:
   lpadmin -p newqueue -v [same-device-URI] -P /etc/cups/ppd/oldqueue.ppd

## Move all jobs which may still be held in the old queue to the
## new queue:
   for i in $(lpstat -o pdfservice | awk '{print $1}'); do \
            lpmove $i newqueue ;
   done

## Start the new queue:
   /usr/bin/enable newqueue
   /usr/sbin/accept newqueue

## Delete old queue:
   lpadmin -x oldqueue

> if its not supported, then why is not
> supported although, the operation looks very basic need?

It is not supported because it complicates the code very much. How do you handle jobs in process when the renaming occurs? How do you handle jobs in a hold queue? How do you handle their job IDs? And so on....

> I am using CUPS 1.1.20

Your SUSE colleagues could easily tell you that the current version of CUPS is 1.1.23. You are running a version that is 15 months old and contains bugs which have been resolved in the meantime. SUSE Linux Professional 9.1 has a newer version than that. Novell should be able to supply their own employees with a current version of their flagship OS, no?

If you don't want to create a negative impression on the competence of your employer's workforce, you are _strongly_ adviced to take a week and study in great detail the documents you find on your own workstation:

   http://localhost:631/documentation.html

and after this, the ones here:

   http://www.cups.org/documentation.hmtl

You are a professional. You will be treated as such, not as a Linux newbie. You are getting paid for your work. Your employer's customers pay your salary. You must be expected to put some effort of your own behind your missing knowledge. You will also not regret it. And we will then be able to gain from your ideas too.

> Thanks,
> Santhosh