GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 640734
add and remove printers
Last modified: 2021-06-09 16:13:07 UTC
It would be good to be able to add and remove printers from the printers panel. It is one of the primary use cases of this tool actually.
It can remove printers now. What should addition of printer look like? I think that it should look like the system-config-printer's addition dialog. Marek
Add printer mockups were discussed over email and on IRC. And now added to http://live.gnome.org/Design/SystemSettings/Printers What else do we need for this?
If search for an appropriate driver fails then it would be useful to fallback to manual selection of printer driver. Something similar to s-c-p's driver selection. It can also happen that given printer doesn't support maintenance command "AutoConfigure" which tells us which capabilities it supports (duplex print, stapler, ...). So it would be helpful to have a fallback for this too. Marek
I've just committed patch which add dialog for adding new printers. It adds devices found by cupsGetDevices() and also printers found on cups server specified in address entry. I want to add some other protocols for which it can search on given address but it will some time yet (e.g. samba). Marek
[Removing gnome-target and adding whitespace entry [gnome3-important] as decided in today's release team meeting: "→ the gnome-settings-daemon printer plugin now handles D-Bus calls from system-config-printer-udev. → not a *blocker* anymore", but of course still welcome to fix the remaining parts.]
In a corporate environment with multiple network printers of the same model, it is impossible to know which printer is which. We have around 10 printers all of the same model on the same network, and I found out about this when I tried to add a new printer. I suggest to add the ip-adress or hostname for network printers, or some other unique identifier.
It's a rather severe bug that I can't add network printers that don't advertise themselves using mDNS/zeroconf. In situations such as universities where neither the network nor the printer is under the control of the user, entering the IP address (or hostname) manually is often the only solution. Infact, if every other method fails, manually entering a hostname/IP address should be the fallback method that *always* works.
Hi Nirbheek, few days ago I've committed a patch which should improve adding of printers with known IP address (see commit "Printers: Use SNMP CUPS backend to discover printers on given address"). It searches given address by CUPS's SNMP backend now and offers you found printers. It typically helps to configure network printers publishing themselves on port 9100. Btw, I continually work on this part of Printers panel so you can await some other improvements. Regards Marek
Spent some time this week with Marek, Lapo, and Jimmac and came up with some fixes for the design. The add printer workflow has been updated on https://live.gnome.org/Design/SystemSettings/Printers. And a hires may be found here: https://github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/blob/master/system-settings/printing/add-printer-dialog.png The idea is that: * Directly attached and not yet added printers would be listed at the top of the view immediately * Network printers would be searched for next and incrementally displayed below directly attached devices * Typing in the search box would filter the list of found devices, unless.. * When the text is a hostname or URL or IP address of some kind we should poke at it and add it to the list of devices if we detect it is a printer * The spinner should be active only when probing, adding, or searching for printers * We should reprobe the network after some time (say every 20 secs or so) * We should automatically detect the driver to use and allow the user to change it afterwards
How much is missing from this?
(In reply to comment #9) > And a hires may be found here: > https://github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/blob/master/system-settings/printing/add-printer-dialog.png Done. (but it is not exactly the same as on the picture, e.g. we don't show status, we show location) > The idea is that: > * Directly attached and not yet added printers would be listed at the top of > the view immediately We search for directly connected printers at first. But we don't differentiate between those which are already added and those which are not. > * Network printers would be searched for next and incrementally displayed > below directly attached devices Done. > * Typing in the search box would filter the list of found devices, unless.. It filters the list but you have to press enter. > * When the text is a hostname or URL or IP address of some kind we should poke > at it and add it to the list of devices if we detect it is a printer If the result of the filter is empty and the string doesn't contain spaces then we suppose that it is an address and we try to detect printers on it. You have to press enter for this in the entry (detecting printers after each keypress is expensive). > * The spinner should be active only when probing, adding, or searching for > printers Done. > * We should reprobe the network after some time (say every 20 secs or so) Not done. > * We should automatically detect the driver to use and allow the user to > change it afterwards Done. The only exception are samba printers, we ask user to select a driver right after he presses "Add".
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version, then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new bug report at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.