460318 - Linux printing via GTK now requires CUPS, cannot find LPR-ng, lpr(traditional) printers.

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Core :: Printing: Setup, defect)

Description

[Brian O'Mahoney]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.5; Linux) KHTML/3.5.9 (like Gecko) SUSE
Build Identifier: Seamonkey 2.x, Firefox 3.03

Both GTK versions of Seamonkey (after SeaMonkey/1.1.11), Firefox (including and after 3.03) cannot locate printers unless CUPS server can be located by GTK. You get "Print to file" only and you can not add printers. Found on SuSE
11.0 with

libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0

Only if you configure an IPP service, does this work and this is impossible, and thus a __complete_show_stopper__ in many shops.

Breaking lpd, which has been the basis of unix printing for 26 years is simply
inexcusable especially as the old code works perfectly.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. ^P or click print
2. NO real printers
3. Use another browser

Comment 1

[Brian O'Mahoney]

Attachment: Work around

This, AFAICT, is an undocumented GTK configuration option
that FIXES both Firefox 3.03 and SeaMonkey 1.1.12+ :

gtk-print-backends = "file,lpr,cups" (in ~/.gtkrc-2.0)

and may/will gelp all gtk print-users.

This, in the Release Note does it.

Comment 2

[Adrian Florinescu [:aflorinescu]]

Hey Brian, can you give me an advice about how to handle this issue?
I'm not sure if any of the above still apply to today's versions/configurations of firefox/gtk.

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Mike: Do you know if this reports makes still sense ?

Comment 4

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

TTBOMK, Gtk+3 doesn't support printing with LPR(-ng), so this is not something we could even work around as of Firefox 46.