Some programs can't find printers

SKelem · 08-02-2011, 01:30 AM

I'm running Fedora 15, x86_64, xfce gui on top of metacity.

Before I upgraded from Fedora 14, I could use several printers.

1. Now, when I open the print dialog, no printers show up from inside Firefox, Thunderbird, gnucash, f-spot, opera, planner, eclipse.

2. The printers ARE recognized inside Adobe acroread, bash/tcsh command line, libreoffice, openoffice, frescobaldi, gedit, evolution, gwenview, okular

3. Gimp is sort of in the middle. It doesn't show any printers in the print dialog, but I can print in only black & white via Gutenprint.

tronayne · 08-02-2011, 08:59 AM

If you have lpstat, try

Code:

lpstat -a

which should show you every printer known to the system along with their status; e.g.,

Code:

fubar-trona-/home/trona: lpstat -a
InkJet accepting requests since Thu 21 Jul 2011 10:32:03 AM EDT
Photosmart accepting requests since Tue 02 Aug 2011 09:41:09 AM EDT

Are your printers "known" to CUPS (and, going to http://localhost:631 should allow you to look at settings for every one of them. In particular, do they show up when you select the Printers tab and are they Idle - "ready to print"?

Hope this helps some.

SKelem · 08-02-2011, 11:38 AM

1. CUPS shows the printers as present and accepting requests.
2. Same for lpstat
% lpstat -a
Cups-PDF accepting requests since Wed 09 Jun 2010 07:25:25 AM PDT
lexmark accepting requests since Mon 01 Aug 2011 11:49:38 PM PDT
Phaser accepting requests since Mon 01 Aug 2011 04:08:17 PM PDT
Phaser@yuri-cos5.cxi accepting requests since Tue 02 Aug 2011 09:22:34 AM PDT
xerox accepting requests since Thu 28 Apr 2011 11:45:37 AM PDT

3. Some applications recognize the printers and can print just fine. (See item #2 in my initial posting, above.)
4. Some applications recognize none of the printers, and therefore, cannot print at all. (See item #1 in my initial posting, above.)

Because of this divergence, it appears that there are two mechanisms for accessing the printers, and some class of the applications aren't using a working mechanism or the other mechanism broke.