Vade Mecum

From Mandriva Community Wiki

Making the New Printer Work: A Tip for the Perplexed.

(This tip was discovered on a Mandriva 2009.1 + KDE3.5.10 desktop box, fully patched.)

One entirely too-common complaint centering on Linux system configuration has to do with making the printer work. At all. Ever. There are many reasons why this is, most seemingly having stemmed from the historic days of Unix-shell command-line gurudom well-embedded in a corporate-networked multi-office single-printer remote-location "Dilbert Cube" environment. However, many distros have made great strides forward in automating this arena of development for the one-off home-desktop system user in recent years; the Mandriva product is no exception.

This tip remedies exactly one hair-messing thing. A Mandriva user who has

A) followed all the Printer Installation Wizard's steps and

B) duly gotten a proper Test Page from the new-installed printer, but

C) still cannot print from any desktop application, might want to

D) revisit the Mandriva System Configurator > hardware > Printer(s) panel in order to drop-down the Context Menu for that printer by right-clicking on its icon. One might then make certain the "Enabled" menu item (fifth line down from the top) is ticked with a checkmark. (At this writing, the default seems to be "Not Ticked", in essence leaving the new-installed printer logically isolated from the rest of the system until corrected.)

Once the proper tick is on the correct menu line, given only that the prior Wizard-based installation was indeed correctly done, the end-user's desktop apps just might then start printing normally instead of queueing their output up in wait for a non-enabled though otherwise correctly (by literal usage) *installed* printer, a-sitting just as fat and dumb on the bus as might any other box of rocks, just waiting for instructions that might not be quite entirely allowed to arrive.

As always, Gentle Reader, ymmv. Good hunting!  :)