Printing from Linux-Notebooks

Pre-condition

To access our printers you have to be connected by cable to the outlets with the blue dots or by VPN.

Access from Wifi is only possible with a VPN Connection.

The following is also valid for any other Linux machine connected to the blue outlets, e.g. self managed desktop computers.

Background

Using the default cups configuration provided with Ubuntu may have some cliches. One problem is a high CPU load of cups. Then cups takes long to add the printers provided by the cups-browsed and the procedure is repeated. If you see this, you should increase the timeouts in cups-browsed.

Open /etc/cups/cups-browsed.conf in your editor as root und search for the statements:

HttpLocalTimeout 10 HttpRemoteTimeout 50

Uncomment this and set this to a higher value than the default, which is to short for some complex printers.

Scenarios

Self managed desktops

This is a simple, but also the most radical way to connect to a printer. This will bypass your local cups server on the notebook and let your applications talk directly with the ITP print server.

You can change this system wide or only for the current user. System wide settings go to the file /etc/cups/client.conf. Personal changes go to ~/.cups/client.conf.

In most cases this file needs to be created. The man page tells you that this is deprecated. Currently this is only valid for MacOS and runs fine with Ubuntu 18.04. Add the following line to the file:

 ServerName print-itp:631

With this setting you will not be able to print somewhere else.

If you are using this, you should disable cups-browsed or remove the package. Esp. if you encounter high a CPU load for cups.