PrinterSharing

Revision 9 as of 2006-11-05 06:17:24

Clear message

Summary

In Breezy it is nontrivial to make a locally installed printer accessible to other computers in the network. This should be simplified , and there should be a GUI for configuring it.

Rationale

Printer sharing is very common in both commercial and home environments, thus it should be easy to set it up.

Use cases

  • Martin wants to make his printer automatically available to other Ubuntu boxes in the LAN (IPP LAN printer detection).
  • John has a printer attached to his computer. He wants to share it with others using Windows Sharing Protocol. (SAMBA, but he's not aware of that name)
  • Terry, an other Ubuntu user in the John office, want to configure the printer shared by John. He doesn't know anything about Samba nor about the name of the shared printer. He's not sure about the model of the printer.
  • Michael want to use a printer connected to a windows box. The printer is shared with the "Unix shared printer" system of Windows XP but Michael is not aware of that fact. He also doesn't know the model printer nor if a Linux driver is available.

Scope

Design

Implementation

Suggestions

In case of CUPS 1.2 make sure that user can use the administration part of the web interface (https://localhost:631/). Go to administration tab of web interface, see the five checkboxes on the right. Check at least "Show printers shared by other systems" and "Share published printers connected to this system" and click "Change Settings". This is implemented in Edgy.

If we switch from gnome-cups-manager to printerdrake as standard printer setup tool, there is a GUI dialog to easily choose networks and computers to share printers to, to accept printer from or to poll printer info from (see [https://features.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/printerdrake/ this specification proposal]) for Feisty.

On the desktop-oriented versions of your distro I suggest to pre-configure CUPS to share printers and accept shares. See my printing tutorial on http://www.linuxprinting.org/till/printing-tutorial/tut.html, section 3.1 for the correct configuration. For sharing to Windows clients see section 4 (and if it still does not work see section 5).

(Till Kamppeter, FSG OpenPrinting/linuxprinting.org)

printerdrake is libqt tool, right? RedHat created new version of system-config-printer and we have that tool in Edgy's repository. It's being used by Xubuntu. It's GTK app and it looks much better than earlier versions. It's not finished, so it needs some fixes and features printerdrake has. I would suggest that tool (only cause it's PyGTK, and printerdrake is QT app)

(Ante Karamatic)

printerdrake is a Perl-GTK2 application.

(Till Kamppeter, FSG OpenPrinting/linuxprinting.org)

Code

Data preservation and migration

Outstanding issues

BoF agenda and discussion


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