Printing in KDE-4

[Gavin Beatty]

On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 8:04 AM, James Richard Tyrer <tyrerj at acm.org> wrote:
> John Layt wrote:
>> On Thursday 05 February 2009 21:14:42 James Richard Tyrer wrote:
>>  > There is nothing in the Control Center (System Settings) and the menu
>> item:
>>  >
>>  > System -> Printing
>>  >
>>  > simply crashes with the error:
>>  >
>>  > File "/usr/KDE-4/bin/system-config-printer-kde", line 63, in <module>
>>  > import cups
>>  > ImportError: No module named cups
>>  >
>>  > So, there is a need for some KPrint project no matter how small because
>>  > there needs to be a KCM to set the print command at the minimum. This
>>  > could probably be added to Default Applications.
>>
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>>
>> That looks like a packaging error in your distro, you need the PyQt4,
>> PyKDE, PyCups, and system-config-printer packages installed for the new
>> Printing KCM in kdeadmin 4.2 to work. The new Printing KCM (aka
>> system-config-printer-kde) is a frontend developed by Kubuntu to the
>> system-config-printer printing configuration backend that is now jointly
>> developed by Red Hat, Ubuntu and Mandriva and is shipped by most distros
>> and is also used by Gnome. There is now little reason for us to develop
>> our own management backend when there is a community and industry
>> consensus on a common backend.
>
> It would appear that I have "system-config-printer" installed.
> Actually, it would be the KDE version that comes with KDE.
>
> IIUC, then we don't have to reinvent the wheel but just make minor
> modifications to it so that it could be used without CUPS.
>
> Actually, with some research, I find that I do not need to set the
> printer command to print (although I am not sure if I would be able to
> choose printers if I had two connected).
>
> It appears that I was able to print from Okular, so it would appear that
> this is a bug.
>
> Still, there needs to be some way to configure printers and to select
> options based on the contents of a PPD file.
>
> --
> JRT
> _______________________________________________
> kde-print mailing list
> kde-print at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-print
>

Hello James,

I don't believe this is a KDE bug. You have system-config-printer-kde
installed which has a dependency on CUPS -- specifically, the python
bindings of CUPS. However, your package manager doesn't seem to have
installed the CUPS python bindings. This is a packaging bug.

Perhaps you installed system-config-printer-kde yourself and the
_installation_ did not depend on CUPS. This could be the case given
we're talking about python here - it probably just wasn't
byte-compiled and hence, no way to fail on `import cups'.

So, either your distro's package has a dependency problem, or this is
standard dependency hell. The (simple) solution being to install the
CUPS python bindings. :)


PS: Okular can still print as it does not depend on the CUPS python
bindings. No bug there.

-- 
Gavin Beatty

SEMPER UBI SUB UBI