In the rabbit hole

Installing printer on GNOME 3

Introduction

Installing a printer on an Arch Linux with GNOME 3 seems to be a little bugged. The printer is a HP LaserJet M1536 on an intranet (not a direct plugging).

Installing the service for printers

What else than CUPS? You can install the cups package which is the main reference about printing service.

$ pacman -S cups

Installing the driver

You may also install the driver for the printer. In the case of a HP LaserJet 1536, the driver is installed with hplip package.

$ pacman -S hplip

Starting CUPS service

You can start the CUPS daemon with systemd.

$ systemctl start cupsd

However, this will only start the daemon for the current session. In order to start it at every boot, use the following command.

$ systemctl enable cups

Adding the printer

This is where the problem begins! You may try to add the printer through the GNOME interface. Go in the preference menu, then the icon about printers. Click on add a printer. If the printer is on your intranet, you should see it after a small time of loading. Click on it to add the printer. You may have an error on this step. Why this is not working? No idea.

However, the printer can also be added through the CUPS interface. Open your web browser and go to your local port 631 (localhost:631/admin). You will be asked for a login and a password. These are the ones about the root account of your computer. Now, you can add the printer, it should work.

Possible errors

The printer does not appear

It seems that GNOME 3 has problems communicating with CUPS. In fact, the printers does not appear into the GNOME PDF viewer. You may try with Evince, which is a nice PDF viewer. Evince had no problem about seeing the installed printers.

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