Firefox 3 cannot print to CUPS printer - Page 2

mogrady · 10-03-2008, 11:21 PM

You got the wrong person bro. I donno what your are talking about.
Good Luck, Michael

rnturn · 10-04-2008, 11:54 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by meetscott

Okay guys.... this is fixed

... but while your post fixed the printing menu problem I had (printing to a printer was "grayed" out) it did nothing for the rendering disaster that shows up on the printer. The resulting printer output looks like a bad screen print from an old XT with a CGI video card. (Especially the fonts.)

Thanks for getting this past the first hurdle but I'm moving my symbolic link back to the most recent 2.0.0.x version of Firefox until I get the latest release from the 3 series downloaded.

--
Rick

camueller · 01-02-2009, 03:23 AM

For KDE 4.1 there is no kprinter until now. However there is an equivalent for GTK name gtklp which runs fine with KDE 4.1.
At least for Kubuntu 8.10 gtklp can be installed using apt. I tried to symlink from lpr to gtklp but it did not work. A shell script (don't forget to make it executable) replacing the original lpr with the following content does work:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/gtklp

In conjunction with modification of gtkrc described in this thread the print dialog of gtklp pops up after Firefox printed to lpr.

Axel

meetscott · 01-03-2009, 03:11 PM

Everyone has had great ideas.

Rick, you are using distributions I abandoned a long time ago, at least according to your signature. Your issue sounds like print filter configuration problem. I wish I could offer some advice to help with that. I have not had any problems along those lines.

Axel, I too have installed Kubuntu 8.10 and Firefox had no issues with printing. It is using KDE 4.1 for those not familiar with Kubuntu 8.10. Strange that you ran into some problems with it but I'm glad you were able to post a solution for others.

Kubuntu is for my work computer. I would never get rid of Slackware on all my other systems ;-)

loenen · 01-05-2009, 06:12 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Swynndla2

ln -s /usr/bin/kprinter /usr/bin/lpr

Quote:

Originally Posted by camueller

A shell script (don't forget to make it executable) replacing the original lpr with the following content does work:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/gtklp

Why didn't I come up with these ideas... Sometimes you forget the most obvious, simple solutions. Thanks a lot guys and a happy new year to all of you!

rnturn · 01-06-2009, 09:31 PM

Thanks,guys, for all for the tips. I finally updated some of the systems on the homenet to OpenSUSE 11.0 and Firefox 3 is printing as FF2 did. Is suspect the theory about a missing (or, more likely, incompatible) library on the workstation running FF3 was ultimately at fault. The CUPS server is still running OpenSUSE 10.2 so I don't think the problem had anything to do with that system. (We'll just have to wait and see what happens when that box goes to 11.0.

)

Quote:

I don't know much about CUPS because I don't use it. Slackware has kept lprng in the "pasture" for the last few releases and even after it's gone from the distribution, I might still install lprng because I like it and it works. I also know a lot about it and I don't mind writing printcap files. It's stable as a rock, it never needs to be restarted, it network prints very well, and it integrates nicely with Samba. In short, I only have to have one printer hooked into my server to have *all* of my computers print without any issues, even XP laptops that come to visit once in a while can use it.

[snip]

At least we know it has nothing to do with CUPS vs lprng because that works on both of our systems.

Lucky you. I tried during one of my early SUSE 10.x installs to select lprng instead of CUPS and found myself in Broken Dependency Hell. (One would have thought that the SUSE installer would insist that you select A print spooler not a particular print spooler and complain only when you had selected none. I really disliked being forced into CUPS. Reminded me of dealing with a certain software vendor whose name I don't wish to utter.) I would much prefer lprng over CUPS which I think tries too hard to second guess you. Example: I had all kinds of trouble getting CUPS on one system to properly print to another CUPS server; the text was getting shifted down the page as though the top margin was twice what I wanted and there was no bottom margin. It turned out to be that the CUPS server was overriding the paper size and not accepting the size that the remote print job was asking for. Took me forever to figure that one out. Probably because I'm too cheap to fork over extra money for the CUPS text book that the maintainers want me to buy if the garbage CUPS help files aren't sufficient to allow me to use the darned software. (Like just where is the CUPS printer path concept even explained; it sure wasn't obvious and I gave up looking for it. Life's too short.)

As for the other distributions I use that you long-ago abandoned? I would dump them too but, like you, I have some really old systems (well, one less now since an old Dell motherboard gave up on me a few months ago) that will only run the older distributions. One system only has 80MB of RAM in it and I can't even get a SUSE 10 or 11 installer to load in that system (maybe not even the V9 installer will run in that small amount of RAM). It'll get replaced one day though. But it's just humming along...

Later...

--
Rick

meetscott · 01-11-2009, 08:51 PM

Quote:

Lucky you. I tried during one of my early SUSE 10.x installs to select lprng instead of CUPS and found myself in Broken Dependency Hell.

I used to love Suse. I stopped using it after 8.2. Suse 9.0 had a lot of stuff broken. I think Novel has done a poor job with it. I gave up because of dependency hell too. I hate RPM and I aim to never use it again.

Quote:

I would dump them too but, like you, I have some really old systems

Have you tried Slackware and XFCE? I'm sure you know about them, but I think it does very well with old hardware. And it's a modern distro with new libraries. Just a thought, I'm sure others' have their opinions and I don't mean to trust my ideology on you :-)

I think Suse is a pretty "heavy" distro. Slackware is like Gentoo (without the long install and unnecessary compilations) when it comes to speed. I suppose Gentoo will be a "little" faster but it won't be by much.

The last thing I found with Suse was the *much* more complex underlying system. I was making customizations all the time and it was much more difficult on Suse than it was in Slackware. I was lucky though, because I started with Slackware, so I knew I was dealing with unnecessary complexity.

I hope I didn't strike a nerve or something. I don't mean to criticize something that's working well for you.

Scott