[cups.general] print for firefox 3.6 and cups

[Johannes Meixner]

Hello,

On Feb 2 11:52 glenn wrote (shortened):

> But when i put
> /etc/gtk-2.0
> in gtkrc
>
> #tk-print-backends = "lpr,file"
> Then firefox print fine.
> I've got only the line lpr in firefox and the it print to the defualt printer
> How can i make to select the printer again

You cannot.

As far as I know the Gtk print backend "lpr" can only submit
a print job via plain "lpr" (i.e. like "cat file | lpr").

As far as I remember there is no such thing as a common
library to maintain LPR print queue related settings
so that programs would have to parse /etc/printcap
or run LPR command line tools and parse its output
and implement some LPD protocol functionality (RFC 1179)
on its own (e.g. to submit a print job to a LPR/LPD server).
As far as I remember there is no LPD protocol functionality
to get a list of print queues or the default queue
from a LPR/LPD server.

If the Gtk print backend for LPR works as one would expect
in a LPR printing system (which means it does the same
what the command "cat file | lpr" would do),
then the result is that the queue which is stored
in the environment variable PRINTER is used
because it is actually the lpr program which submits
(when lpr is called without a "-P queue_name" parameter)
whatever it gets via stdin as print job to the queue
which is configured as default in LPR and this means
to $PRINTER if the environment variable PRINTER is set.

In the old days when we had LPR, the usual way to
let any application print to a default queue was to
have the environment variable PRINTER set and let all
applications submit their print output via plain "lpr".


In contrast the Gtk print backend "cups" lets you select
a print queue because CUPS provides library functions
to maintain whatever print queue related settings.


Because in your case the driver crashes when the Gtk print
backend "cups" is used but works when plain "lpr" is used,
it indicates that there might be somewhere a special
driver-related setting when "cups" is used which lets
this driver crash.

See
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Print_Settings_with_CUPS
how to find out if there is such a setting.

In short:
As root remove /etc/cups/lpoptions
and as normal user remove ~/.lpoptions and ~/.cups/lpoptions
if those files exist to get rid of any special setting
so that only the default settings of the print queue are used.


Kind Regards
Johannes Meixner
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