18.04 has no support for my printer

[Brian]

On Tue 16 Oct 2018 at 12:45:05 +0100, Peter Flynn wrote:

> On 16/10/18 08:48, Brian wrote:
> > On Tue 16 Oct 2018 at 00:20:35 +0100, Peter Flynn wrote:
> [...]
> >> If it means something else then I have misunderstood the message.
> > 
> > It is to do with permissions. 
> 
> OK.
> 
> > "CUPS" is often used as shorthand for "printing system", which is a
> > collection of software from different sources. On occasion this is
> > not very helpful. I would take CUPS to be the software at cups.org.
> 
> I take it to be the packages called 'cups*' in my current Ubuntu distro.

Your list would include cups-filters, cups-pdf and cups-tea4cups. All
are non-CUPS projects and not supported at cups.org.
 
> > As far as the drivers it provides:
> > 
> > # /usr/lib/cups/daemon/cups-driverd dump | grep sample | wc -l
> > 15
> 
> That is presumably just the ones that were installed.

15 is the total number of drivers (PPDs) installed by CUPS. cups-filters
will install more (but not many) because the cups  package depends on
it.

> > Many other drivers can indeed be listed by the web interface - but
> > they are not shipped by CUPS.
> 
> OK, so it must be getting them in real time from a server somewhere.

They are installed on the system by the printer-driver-* packages.

> These are the ones that are listed if I browse to localhost:631 and
> click on Administration and go through the process and it eventually
> lets you pick the make of printer (from Alps to Zebra) and for each one
> it lists all the printers it knows about (for HP there are 3000 listed,
> although many are alternative versions, eg 3.16.3 and 3.17.11, but it
> includes three for the DeskJet 1510).

When that page is accessed cups-driverd forms the list from *.drv files
and other sources such as /usr/share/ppd.

-- 
Brian.