41. Managing Your Printer

Printer management can be done in the Printers settings dialog, which is accessible from the Hardware category of the Settings Manager, the Settings category of the application Applications Menu (Ctrl + Escape), and in the Application Finder (Alt + F3).

The Printers settings dialog allows you to add a new local printer (a printer directly connected to your computer through a USB, serial or printer port) or network printer (a printer connected on your network or a printer shared on the network through another computer). It also allows you to modify listed printers’ settings, such as renaming how they are labeled on your system, restarting, or disabling them. You can also share a printer with other computers on your network thereby making it a network printer. Depending upon the make and model of your printer, you can also check your printer’s consumables, such as toner or ink as well as paper, or send test print jobs.

Add Printer

Setting up a new local printer should be as easy as plugging it into your computer and powering it on. The printer should be automatically detected and configured. Once it is successfully detected, a printer icon will appear in the notification area of the panel and a notification popup will appear with the text Printer is ready for printing.

If your printer was not detected, you will need to follow these steps:

Open the Printers settings dialog.

Click the Add button in the toolbar or Server → New → Printer in the menu to open the New Printer dialog.

Select the appropriate Printer, Port, URI, Protocol or Network Printer entry in the Devices list on the left of the dialog. If your printer is not visible, you may need to click on the triangle next to “Find Network Printer” to expand the list of printers on your network.

Where applicable, fill in any relevant details into the text fields and/or dropdown lists on the right of the dialog and then click the Forward button.

If you are adding a local printer, your computer will search for it and install its drivers. If you are installing a network printer, you will go through additional steps of selecting the printer manufacturer, printer model and driver.

You will then be prompted to enter a short name, description, and location of the printer.

Press the Apply button to finalize the configuration of the printer.

You will be prompted with a dialog asking Would you like to print a test page?

If you press the Print Test Page button, a test page will print and you can verify if it printed correctly or you can press Cancel. Either way, your printer is ready to print.

If you are experiencing problems adding a printer with the steps above, you can try using the CUPS browser-based interface. It can be accessed at http://localhost:631/. Click the Administration menu item at the top of the page for options to add and find new printers. Do not make any changes in the Printers settings dialog or other system printer management utilities until you are finished using the CUPS browser-based interface. You may need to restart CUPS for it to reflect any changes that you make directly in the browser-based interface.

If the printer is directly connected to a Windows machine on your network, choose the Windows Printer via SAMBA entry from the Devices list. If you do not know the protocol or details of your network printer, you should consult the printer’s manual or ask your network administrator.

Search the OpenPrinting database or check the Community Help Printer page for information on your printer.

Share Printer

If you want to share your local printer with other computers on your network:

Open the Printers settings dialog.

Click Server → Settings in the menu.

Enable the Publish shared printers connected to this system checkbox.

Click the OK button.

Then go to your secondary Xubuntu installation and open the Printers settings dialog. Click the Add button in the toolbar, then expand the Network Printer option. The shared printer should appear below as the sharing computer’s IP address. You may need to first search for the IP address using the Find Network Printer option.