[Kde-print-devel] [Bug 147470] New: printer creation fails with "Unable to create test printer"

[Joe Bayes]

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http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=147470         
           Summary: printer creation fails with "Unable to create test
                    printer"
           Product: kcontrol
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: unspecified
        OS/Version: Linux
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: normal
          Priority: NOR
         Component: kcmprintmgr
        AssignedTo: kde-print-devel kde org
        ReportedBy: jbayes cs oberlin edu


Version:            (using KDE 3.5.7-0.1.fc7 Fedora, Fedora release 7 (Moonshine))
Compiler:          Target: i386-redhat-linux
OS:                Linux (i686) release 2.6.21-1.3228.fc7

The symptom of this bug is that I attempted to add a printer (hosted on a Win2000 box) as best I could, and failed. The test page did not print, and the error message was, "Unable to create test printer"

I do not know what went wrong. However, I have some guesses. 

1) I did not click the "Administrator Mode" button, as there was nothing to indicate that this was something I needed to do. If someone wants to add a printer, then the intuitive thing for them to do would be to click the "add printer" button, not the "administrator mode" button. <b>Users should be able to simply click the "add printer" button when they want to add a printer.</b> If the system needs root, it should ask for root, not just mysteriously fail. (I do not know that this was the cause of my problem...but my solution involved clicking the "administrator mode" button, so I'm including it here in case it is a necessary (but non-intuitive) step.)

2) The third screen that pops up, "user identification", does not make it clear what service the user is authenticating himself to. I initially tried authenticating with the user/password of the primary user of the W2K box. When I did this, clicking the "scan" button on a later page could not find the printer I was looking for. In order to get the printer to show up when I pushed the "scan" button, I needed to authenticate on the third screen as anonymous (to get to a printer that I know is password-protected). This is non-intuitive. If the computer must ask the user for a password at this stage, it should make it clear that this is the password that will be used to scan for printers, not the password that will be used to access the share. (A better solution might be to scan anonymously first, then only ask for authentication if the user indicates that an anonymous scan failed to find their printer. Or something like that.)