Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 103224
local printer must be the default
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:57:11 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5a) Gecko/20030813 Mozilla Firebird/0.6.1 Description of problem: It seems I can't add a local printer that isn't the default printer. There isn't even a way to undefault the automatically defaulted printer. Why shouldn't I be allowed to specify a networked printer as the default printer on a system? Is this a CUPS limitation? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 0.6.47-1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Add a local printer 2. Try to undefault it. 3. Actual Results: A local printer is automatically the default printer and this can't be changed in any way that I can see. Expected Results: A sysadmin should be able to make a networked printer the default. Additional info:
Yes, this is a CUPS limitation. There is no mechanism for either a) setting a system's default printer to be a remote queue name, or b) making a system's default printer override local defaults when browsed
Perhaps I did not completely understand the question, but I believe I have successfully configured a remote (browsed) printer as default. It took a lot of experimentation and it may not work for you and may not continue to work for me. The easiest way is to run gnome-print-manager as root and select the desired (remote browsed) printer and then under the "Printer" menu select "Set as Default". This must be done as root and then affects all users on that computer. As near as I can tell what this does is alter the file /etc/cups/lpoptions and adds a line like Default browsed_queue where browsed_queue is the name of the cups browsed printer. If you re-run gnome-print-manager and set loc_printer as the default the effect on this file will be to change Default browsed_queue Dest loc_printer <whatever> to Default loc_printer <whatever>
Aha. That's worth knowing. Thanks.
"I believe I have successfully configured a remote (browsed) printer as default." But is there a *local* printer as well? My complaint was that I couldn't set a networked printer as the default if there was *also* a local printer.
> But is there a *local* printer as well? My complaint was that I couldn't set a > networked printer as the default if there was *also* a local printer. Yes, this works when there are both local and browsed printers. I have not tested it extensively, but I just tried it and it worked fine. You need to be careful that no PRINTER environment variable is set since that will override everything.
BTW if modifying /etc/cups/lpoptions and setting "Default" is indeed the correct and intended way to notify cups of the default printer, then there is a bug in lpadmin as "lpadmin -d print_queue" does NOT do this.
I think this should be fixed in 0.6.83-1 in the Fedora 'development' tree.
I have not checked it in a recent distro, but in FC3, with both local and remote printers: 1) system-config-printer is happy to let me mark a remote printer as a default (and on subsequent invocations it remembers that I did it), but this does not seem to have any effect 2) lpadmin -d foo does not have any effect either! I had to edit /etc/cups/lpoptions manually.