firefox and printing
 

hello, im trying to get printing to work in firefox, however, my printer that i setup using cups doesnt show up. when i print from other programs, like gedit, its no problem, but my printer doesnt show up in firefox. any ideas?

If you have KDE, and you have it setup with CUPS, then you can click "Properties" in the print dialog, and select "kprinter" as your print command. This will open a KDE dialog where you can select your printer. The default in Firefox is to use standard old "lpr", which should probably work with your printer, and I really doubt you'd not any difference.

That's because Mozilla uses a nonstandard (and, frankly, really wierd) print dialog. You can do as the above poster suggests or you have a couple of other options:

1. If the printer you want to use is the default in CUPS, then mozilla will print to that, well, by default.

2. If not, and you are using bash as your shell (this is the default in most distros), then you can set the MOZ_PRINTER_NAME to tell Mozilla what printer to use. Add the following line to the .bashrc file in your home directory:

export MOZ_PRINTER_NAME="myprinter"

where "myprinter" is whatever you've called your new printer in CUPS. Then log out and log back in. There are ways to get around this annoying need, but it's simplest to just re-login. Mozilla should now use that printer.

3. It occurs to me that even if you run gnome you can still run kprinter. See if it's installed and if it is then you can still do as the above poster suggests and have Mozilla use it.

Hope this helps,

--Brad

usernamenumber,

Though I'm using bash as my shell I can't seem to find .bashrc anywhere. Strikes me as odd but, as far as I can tell, no .bashrc.

I have an NFS machine that 1) my printer is connected to and 2) Firefox is actually installed on. The "shortcut" on my client machine points to the finefox script file on my NFS machine. This arrangement works fine until I want to print. I suppose I could do it the way tk31337 suggests but I was hoping for a little more elegant solution. BTW I'm running Slack 10.0 on both machines, CUPS is installed and works well with everything else, including OOo1.1.1.

You mentioned another way to accomplish this. I'm very comfortable with command line and file editing, so any pearls of wisdom you might have on the subject would be most welcome.

usernamenumber

Just a quick note of thanks for your post here.

I am using a Konica-Minolta magicolor 2300DL (color laser) which required a foo2zjs driver found via linuxprinting.org, and an ICM which incidentally came from a windows .exe file, and a .ppd that I created at the foo2zjs site and downloaded and installed.

It was your post however that enabled me to get my Mozilla 1.7.2 to work on my Suse 9.0 virtual machine.

Thanks again