Add Printer in Ubuntu 12.04 with Gnome 3.4

By Jimmy Bonney | July 13, 2012

Cartridge

Following an update of Ubuntu during which I simply formatted the system partition, I lost all the printers that were previously configured on my computer.

Based on what I read on different blog posts and forums, adding a printer from Unity is quite straightforward. Unfortunately for me, I am getting used to Gnome and have decided to have it as my main window manager and it seems that some of the tools working in Unity do not function properly under Gnome.

When one goes to System Settings > Printers and click on the + button to add a new network printer, the following (not so explicit) message is displayed:

FirewallD is not running. Network printer detection needs services mdns, ipp, ipp-client and samba-client enabled on firewall.

A sudo apt-get install ... does not solve the problem so it seems that there is an issue deeper than that.

Fortunately, an alternative method exist to install new network printer on Ubuntu when using Gnome: system-config-printer (a CUPS configuration tool). So to solve the issue, simply install system-config-printer with a sudo apt-get update system-config-printer and launch it from a terminal or from the command tool (Alt+F2).

From there, it will be possible to add network printer simply by specifying the IP address. If you are lucky, the program should detect automatically the necessary drivers and everything should be up and running within minutes.

Add network printer with system-config-printer


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