Local printers not supported

[Michael Hirsch]

On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 3:38 PM, David McGlone<david at dmcentral.net> wrote:
> On Thursday 06 August 2009 01:30:37 pm Michael Hirsch wrote:
>> On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 10:14 AM, Eberhard
> Roloff<tuxebi at gmx.de> wrote:
>> > Michael Hirsch wrote:
>> >> I'm trying to help my Dad with a problem.  He's using KDE
> 3.5.x and
>> >> his USB printer stopped working.  He can see the printer with
> "lsusb"
>> >> so it would appear that USB works, but when he tries to add
> the
>> >> printer with the KDE Add Printer Wizard, the choice "Local
> printer
>> >> (parallel, serial, USB)" is deactivated.  He can't press the
> radio
>> >> button to enable it.  The other radio buttons are all active
> except
>> >> for "Serial Fax/Modem printer".
>> >
>> > What does "stopped working" mean?
>>
>> It used to work, and now it doesn't.
>>
>> > Why does he need to add an apparently existing printer?
>>
>> The printer is defined, but not functional.  One approach I gave
> him
>> was to try to define it again.  Also, he took the printer to my
> Mom's
>> computer which is also running Kubuntu and tried to install it
> there
>> with the same symptom.
>>
>> Strangely, when he tries to edit the currently defined printer, it is
>> defined to be a local printer, but the local printer field is greyed
>> out and not functional.
>>
>> > You might try with http://localhost:631 and see, whether you
>> > can reenable the printer and print a testpage from there.
>>
>> I'll see if I can talk him through that.  It's tricky because he lives
>> far away, so this is all phone support.
>
> Why don 't you use KRDC (remote desktop) to help him?

Good idea.  I've done that on occasion.  The tricky part is that he is
behind a firewall owned by his DSL provider and doesn't know how to
open port.  I know how to open ports to me, so we can do some
trickiness with ssh to get krdc talking, but it's non-trivial.  It
would be nicer if KRDC were more efficient.  Wasn't there a plan to
integrate NX into KRDC once upon a time?

Michael