Cyril

Printers

Finding and using them on immutable distributions

Overview

1. Setup printer via CUPS
2. Use flatseal to ensure that flatpak apps use cups for printing

Challenge (& solution)

Gnome does a great job of finding network printers, but flatpaks can’t print to the printer installed by GNOME.
I have not been successful in using flatseal to manipulate each flatpak app to be able to have access to our network printer.

The remaining options were:

1) Have the flatpak print-to-pdf (or download)
which allows me to print from the filesystem.
(works, but cumbersome) 2) Configure the print-server CUPS to handle the printing <-Winner!
which the flatpaks all seem to play-well-with.

CUPS

Access:

The admin page of the cups interface (localhost:631/admin) is how printers are added and managed via cups, and typically requires a login.
Many systems default to allowing members of the root, sys, and wheel groups to log into the cups admin page, but some require additional configuration before a user login is permitted.

Configuration 01:

/etc/cups/cups-files.conf
--------------------
SystemGroup root wheel

Configuration 02:

# Create a group specifically for printer administration
sudo groupadd -g 999 lpadmin

# Append 'lpadmin' group to someUser
sudo usermod -aG lpadmin someUser

/etc/cups/cups-files.conf
--------------------
SystemGroup root wheel lpadmin

Final steps:

• Log into localhost:631/admin with my user credentials
• Add a printer:
  • driverless config for hp envy 4520
  • socket://192.168.9.212:9100

Flatseal

Use as needed to direct apps to the cups socket.

References

CUPS config file editing learned from the archWiki for CUPS