system-config-printer

This page is about the printer administration tool system-config-printer, which first appeared in Fedora (as part of my work at Red Hat), and later Ubuntu and other operating systems.

The purpose of the tool is to configure a CUPS server (often the local machine) using the CUPS API. The tool is written in Python, using pygtk for the graphical parts and with some Python bindings (pycups) for the CUPS API.

It is largely the same as using the CUPS web interface for configuring printers, but has the advantage of being a native application rather than a web page. It appears in the Fedora menu under System ▸ Administration ▸ Printing.

As a result of using the CUPS API the tool is able to configure remote CUPS instances and is not limited to configuring CUPS on the local machine. The CUPS library providing the API uses HTTP and IPP to communicate with the CUPS server.

I work on this application as part of my job at Red Hat.

Download

Download tarball releases from:
http://cyberelk.net/tim/data/system-config-printer/

You will also require pycups from:
http://cyberelk.net/tim/software/pycups/

Source Code

The git repository is available at fedorahosted.org:

git clone git://git.fedorahosted.org/git/system-config-printer.git

or browse using gitweb.

New releases are announced at freshmeat.

Translations

Language translations should be submitted through Fedora Transifex.

Mailing list

There is a public mailing list for discussion of the development of this project.

Reporting bugs

If you have found a bug in system-config-printer, please report it. If system-config-printer came with your operating system, report the bug to the operating system vendor:

222 Responses to “system-config-printer”

  1. Vaasu says:

    Hi J,

    This is vaasu here.. i dont have any idea about Printer… Eg : The configuration or anything.. But i know dat before printer should be installed driver should be installed first. Could you help me out with mentioning the steps involved in the configuration?

    Thank you,
    J.

  2. tim says:

    In fact, simply connecting the printer to the computer is usually all that is needed when using Fedora, and the same is true for many other Linux distributions.

    If you have a network printer, just start the printing configuration tool and follow the instructions.

    Sorry I can’t be more specific — you haven’t said which operating system you are using in particular (Fedora, Ubuntu, etc), and they are a bit different.

Leave a reply

Comments are moderated. Comments that are inappropriate, offensive, vulgar, badly written or insulting will be deleted or edited to make the author look silly.