Printer is a Canon iP4850 on Linux Mint 16.

When I enter printer properties and select job options, I cannot change the print color mode, I change from color to monochrome click apply and it just reverts back to color.

There is no way I can print in Black and White.

Any ideas please.

Thanks.

You don't say whether or not the printer was connected at the time you installed Mint. It may be that you need to reconfigure your printer via the CUPS browser tool, or the command line version lpadmin.

I have one physical printer, but I have 12 printer instances via CUPS configuration for specific printing tasks.

I have printers configured in the following manner:

draft-color-portrait
normal-color-portrait
phpto-color-portrait
draft-monochrome-portrait
normal-monochrome-portrait
letterqual-monochrome-portrait

and six more of the same for landscape.

I then used lpadmin to designate one as the default.

When it's time to print, I select the appropriate printer setup and number of copies.

It I were in a business environment with need to print for a distribution list, I could include the default number of copies in the setups listed above.

For anyone with frequent printing requirements, it's a great time saver.

Thanks for your reply, much appreciated, I am no Linux expert can you eplain in easy stages how I go about doing this.

Thanks.

You can configure CUPS from a browser by adding "http://localhost:631" (without quotes) in the URL bar of the browser. That will access the CUPS configuration application.

However, by default, and for security reasons, root will be unable to connect to a non-root user's X server, and you wont be able to access the CUPS printer configuration unless you give the root user permission to do so. You do that in the following manner:
As user, open a terminal and enter this command: xhost + localhost

Now the root user can run a graphical application such as a browser within the users environment.

Now, using the firefox browser as an example, if you use the kde environment, run the command: kdesu firefox
to run firefox as root.

Or, if you use the gnome desktop, run the command: gksu firefox.

Once firefox is open, enter http://localhost:631 in the url bar.

In the resulting page, click on Manage Printers. The page that comes up should list your printer. You can then edit the configuration by clicking on the Edit button and go through the prompts to configure it to your liking.

When done, exit the browser.

Once you have made a change to a configuration file you need to restart the CUPS server by sending it a HUP signal or using the supplied initialization script. The CUPS distributions install the script in the init.d directory with the name cups. The location varies based upon the operating system, but Mint probably uses the same location as it's ancestor distro Debian.

/etc/init.d/cups restart

That will make your changes take effect immediately.

Now, back in the terminal, as user, enter xhost - localhost to reverse the command given earlier.

For more in-depth information, read the CUPS documentation.

Tried the above and can find no edit button!



Thanks for your help.

Hi,

try the "Administration" tab or try clicking on "iP4800-series" in the "Queue Name" column.

Evo2.

Quote: try the "Administration" tab tried this but leads nowhere of any help or try clicking on "iP4800-series" in the "Queue Name" column tried this and it leads to two choices Maintenance which offers a choice of Printing a test page, clean heads, repeat jobs, cancel all etc. The other choice is Admin which gives two choices Modify Printer and Set Default, but neither give the opportunity to cange colour or monochrome etc. .