How I find out what group my usb printer thinks is...I guess actually the problem is what user the system thinks is attempting to operate the usb printer...or to be more technically correct, what user is attempting to access /dev/usb/lp0?

Printer is a HP C6380 using hpijs driver (part of hplip) and will print only after executeing which gives "others" permission read/write permission for /dev/usb/lp0. Default is read/write to owner (root) and group(lp) only.

Print job is owned by user crashedagain. Users crashedagain, cupsys, hplip and lp are members of group lp. Since both crashedagain and hplip are members of group lp, they should be able to access the printer....shouldn't they?

Another oddity...unless chmod 666 /dev/usb/lp0 is executed, the kde "install printers" dialog cannot access local printers.

chmod 666 ~ must be done after every startup because the system sets default permissions each time it populates /dev during stsrtup.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=116349

http://groups.google.com/group/linux...lnk=raot&pli=1

Thank you very much for the references.

I have temporarily solved the problem by adding "chmod 666 /dev/usb/lp0" to bootmisc.sh. This may or may not be the most reliable way to solve the problem.

The Ubuntu forum suggests editing udev rules to mode="0666" on creation of the /dev/lp* but there seems to be an error in specifying which file to edit...the posting says to edit permissions.rules but the line structure quoted only appears in udev.rules. I'll try it anyway.

The other suggestion is to edit the groups to allow lpadmin to access the printer...problem is I do not have "lpadmin" in either groups or users. I don't think editing cups config files is a good solution...it is possible they may get overwritten if/when cups is upgraded.