[kde-linux] System -> Printing doesn't work.

[Rajko M.]

On Saturday 21 February 2009 06:01:16 am James Richard Tyrer wrote:

> > Note, that should work but it may vary according to your distro.  I use
> > Gentoo and mine is actually /usr/kde/4.2/bin/systemsettings
>
> Actually, "Printing" isn't in System Settings, but I tried to open it in
> a Konsole after "su" and it didn't help.  And as a bonus, it screwed up
> my root account. :-)  Apparently, KDE4 doesn't know the difference
> between running with root permissions and actually being root.

It is not KDE4, or any other DE, that should know. 

su     root privileges - user that invoked environment
su -   root privileges - root environment

Note that pesky little dash after command. It is the only difference between 
mess and "work as expected". 

The "automatic"  mess is produced in user account, as user can't access his 
configuration files. They are created with ownership root:users, or in 
general root:<user_group>. When access permission is set that only user, and 
nobody else can access file, then file is accessible only to root, although 
it is in user home directory. 

In case that root account is messed that didn't went without your further 
help, beyond command "su". It could be just another "I didn't know", but what 
to do, we all make mistakes. 


We can argue why is default of "su" what it is, but we can't cut corners 
without knowing what current set of arguments is doing. 

I used for years
   su root
or 
   su <user_name>
because default Linux shell bash [1] has history of commands that you can 
browse using cursor keys up and down, which makes longer form of command 
acceptable. 

> Any who, I use the CUPS configuration HTML page to set up the printer,
> which doesn't solve the problem but it is a workaround that worked.
>
> So, I tried printing and it printed.  Problem is that it printed the
> PostScript code rather than the page.  Other people have had that
> problem so I presume that it can be fixed.

It is usually symptom of mismatch between selected driver and actual printer 
model. Drivers is for postscript printer that can interpret PS code, and 
actual printer is not, so it prints it out. 

The basic printer configuration is distribution specific, KDE (any) just takes 
over what is already configured. If there is no printer queue (usually called 
just printer) then KDE can't do much about. I haven't seen KDE specific 
configuration interface to CUPS, or any other printing system. 
 


[1] talking about CLI or text mode it is usually meant bash shell. There are 
other, but almost all Linux systems I tried have bash as default. 


-- 
Regards, Rajko
http://en.opensuse.org