Re: can I define a default printer in firefox? how? [solved (maybe) ]

On Sat, Feb 25, 2006 at 04:06:37PM -0500, Patrick Wiseman wrote:
On 2/25/06, Andrew Sackville-West <andrew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sat, 25 Feb 2006 13:02:09 -0700
Paul E Condon <pecondon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sat, Feb 25, 2006 at 02:26:50PM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
On Saturday 25 February 2006 14:07, Florian Kulzer wrote:
Paul E Condon wrote:
Thanks. This really a good lead, but its not working. See below.

[...]

The mozilla-xprint behavior is mostly controlled by the settings in
/etc/Xprint/C/print/Xprinters.

On my machine the above named file exists and contains the lines
referred to below. But it also contains the following comments:

<quote>
# X*printers sample configuration file
#
#
# This file belongs in /usr/lib/X11/X*printers, where the "*" is
the
# display number of the server. For example, if the server is
# invoked using the command X :0, then the X0printers file is used.

####################################################################
#### </quote>

When I make changes to this file and restart my X system, I see no
change in behavior. Perhaps I need to make a copy per this comment.
But this seems to me to violate Debian policy, so I wonder if there
is not something else that should be done instead.

Just to make sure what you mean by "restarting your X system": You
have to explicitly restart "xprint" for the changes to have an
effect. (I don't think xprint is restarted automatically when you
restart the X server; at least during bootup and shutdown it seems
to
be a separate item.)

Furthermore, I now realized that my default printer just happens to
be
the first one when all printers are listed alphabetically, so maybe
achieving the desired effect was accidental in my case.

And I'll submit that if cups and gutenprint are properly installed and
configured it works, and does so without any interference from xprint.
I saw it in an htop report one day, got curious and stopped it, also
disabling its startup at boot time. That was about a month ago and
I've yet to have anything refuse to print or print wrongly in any way.
So I've removed one potential source of printing mischief.

What exactly WAS it supposed to do anyway?

Regards,
Florian

--
Cheers, Gene

Hi, Gene.

I'm the OP on this thread. My complaint is that firefox print window
always lists five candidate printers, only two of which actually work
and neither of these is ever the default selection. Every time I
forget to explicitlys select a printer, I fail to get my printout. I
find this an annoying waste of time.

I just removed xprint altogether and its been fine. it looks scary because
apt-get remove xprint wants to remove the meta package x-windows-system, but
that is only a meta-package and does no damage, AFAICT.


I too have purged xprint without ill effect, and firefox now lists only my
CUPS printers, but in alphabetical order, ignoring my CUPS default.

Patrick

1. Debian does not use /usr/lib/X11/X*printers ,
it reads /etc/Xprint/C/Xprinters instead at boot.

2. /etc/init.d/xprint restart does NOT cause re-read of above config. file.
The only way I have found to set the new config. is to reboot (ugh!)

3. Commenting out two lines in Xprinters gets rid of the two most offensive
printers.

4. The remaining printers are diplayed in lexical order with the first
one selected. Systemwide defaults and CUPS defaults have no effect on
display order or default selection in firefox. So I choose a name for
my desired printer that collates before the others.

5. Notes in /usr/share/doc/xprint-common/README.Debian indicate that the
Debian maintainer, Drew Parsons, is aware of this messy situation but is
awaiting work by others on Linux Standard Base before implementing a fix.

IMHO its a mess, but there are a lot of other messes in this world that
are worse than this one. Xprint seems to have been created to provide a
platform independent method for rendering from http: directly into
post-script for proper, clean printing of html. But it doesn't seem to
really solve the problem of work-a-day web printing, except when all its
nifty features are disabled, and if you are not too demanding about the
quality of the solution.

Thanks to all who contributed. Maybe this review will get others to an
end point faster than it took me. And, maybe future developments in X
will obsolete these comments (soon, I hope).

--
Paul E Condon
pecondon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


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