This is Alan Pope with the fifteenth screencast
in the Ubuntu Month of Screencasts.
All the screencasts from this month can be downloaded for free from our website,
which is screencasts.ubuntu.com
In this screencast we're going to look at setting up printers on Ubuntu.
We are going to look at four different ways to set up a printer.
The first way is using Ubuntu 7.10,
which is not out yet, but it will be very shortly.
Now what I've done here is I've just plugged an HP DeskJet printer into the machine
and you can see a little icon appears on the toolbar.
And very shortly afterwards it tells me the DeskJet 970c is ready for printing.
So it auto-detects the printer,
installs the driver and installs the printer... done.
No user intervention required.
If I hit configure I am taken to the printer configuration screen,
you can see here it's detected the manufacturer of the printer,
set it as a local device.
It's detected the connection that we've made to the printer,
which is a USB connection.
And if I want to I can make this the default printer
and print a test page.
And all the other kind of useful diagnostic tools.
We also have various settings for the printer.
Including enabling and disabling the printer,
allowing it to receive jobs,
configuring who is able to access the printer.
Maybe if this was a color printer and expensive color cartridges,
we could restrict who has access to print to it.
We also have the ability to change standard options
like the paper size, and the print out mode.
This is useful if you want to print photos or high quality prints.
But on other occasions you want to print draft quality.
This printer has a duplex unit, so it can print double-sided.
And here we can choose what the default for double-sided printing is.
We can also choose in a bit more detail, the settings
or control the settings how output appears on the page.
If we leave it as controlled by print out mode,
then we just need to use these high level options here.
So for example printing photos, I choose the bottom option.
And there are some more advanced options at the end,
like how many copies of each print out we get,
the orientation and whether we're going to scale the image
or mirror the image as well.
But in essence all I did was plug the printer in
and it was detected and installed.
And I can test printing by just going to any application,
like the text editor.
Type something in, go to File -> Print
and you can see here it lists all the printers I have available,
including my DeskJet printer.
I can change the default options using these various tabs and buttons.
And if I want to print, I just press the Print button.
As soon as I do that you can see the printer icon on the toolbar lights up
and if I click on it, you can see the print queue.
There's my job waiting to go to the printer
and when it's finished it'll disappear.
When that disappears you'll see the printer icon on the toolbar goes gray
and you can see it says no documents queued.
So there's nothing waiting for that printer, it's printed successfully.
So that's installing a local printer under Gutsy, version 7.10 of Ubuntu.
I'm now switched to another machine, which is running version 7.04,
also known as Feisty Fawn.
And I'll try three different ways of configuring network attached printers.
First of all let's just check we have a network connection.
This particular machine has two network cards, of which I'm only using one.
If I right-click the little Network Manager icon and choose Connection Information,
you can see here I have a network address, 192.168.x.x
It doesn't really matter, I know I'm connected to the Internet, my network rather.
Now if I go to System -> Administration -> Printing,
there are no printers on this particular machine
and to add a new one all I do is double-click New printer.
Of course Ubuntu supports multiple printers of different types,
I just don't have any on this particular machine.
Now creating a printer is an administrative task.
I'm making a change to the system, it's going to be reflected for all users,
so I need to enter my password to prove that I'm authorized to do this.
It does a little scan of the printer database
and then we get to step 1 of 3 for creating a new printer.
We have a number of options here.
The first option that's ticked is Local or Detected Printer.
Local would obviously be if the printer was physically plugged into this machine,
which in this particular case it isn't.
Detected Printer is a printer that, well, it's detected on the network.
a little bit further down the screen you can see it's detected a Genicom microLaser,
which is my printer.
Alternatively I can manually choose, Network Printer
and choose one of the various protocols for connecting to printers.
If I had a HP printer with a JetDirect card or compatible, I could choose that.
If it was a Unix printer or a Windows printer, I could choose these middle options.
And if it was another Linux system, perhaps running CUPS, the printer system,
then I could print to that remote printer as well.
We'll look at one of those options, in fact two of them a bit later.
For now I'll just choose dedicated printer
and I'll choose the printer that it's already detected.
That printer happens to be switched on, it's on my local LAN, on the floor next to my desk
and you can see here it knows the network address of that printer.
And in fact I can show you the printer, I have got my webcam pointing at it.
There it is, that's my printer on the floor.
So that's step 1, it's detected the printer, I haven't had to do anything at all.
I just double-clicked New printer, it detected the printer and I clicked forward.
The next thing I do is find the printer on the manufacturer list.
Now my printer happens to be some weird, wacky manufacturer,
so it's not actually listed here.
But I've looked in the manual and it says that it's postscript compatible,
so I'll choose Generic
and then in the bottom half of the screen you can see the Generic printer drivers.
and postscript is listed down the bottom.
I choose postscript and then at the very bottom there is a driver option.
There may be multiple options in this list.
I'll just choose the recommended one.
If there is no driver then possibly you can install a driver on the system with this Install driver button.
I then hit forward to the last step.
I can give my printer a name to differentiate it from any other printers on my network
or maybe connected to my machine.
So mine is a PageMaster 210n, so I'll fill that in.
You can give it a description as well
and also specify the location.
In a corporate environment this is obviously useful,
having a description and location you could specify,
which floor or whose office the printer is in
or which room it's near or something like that.
For me I don't need to specify that much detail.
I hit finish and there we go, we've got a printer.
If you right-click the printer and choose Properties,
or rather right-click and choose Make default, it makes it the default printer.
And then right-click Properties,
You can see some of the options to do with that printer.
These are all the settings it picked up when I added the printer.
If you click Become Administrator,
then it gives you the ability to make changes to this screen,
but only if you've got the rights to do that on this system.
I can print a test page.
and if we grab the webcam
There is the test page coming out of the printer
If we turn it over,
you can see, sure enough, it's an Ubuntu test page.
If you've got a color printer then those little blocks come out in color.
So that was successful, three steps and we've got a printer and I can print a test page.
Obviously there are options that I can change.
paper size, which tray is used,
and whether the printer is doing duplex or simplex printing,
that's two sided or single sided printing.
And there may be some advanced options,
depending upon your printer, there may be further options on this advanced tab.
That's it, that's all I needed to do.
So that was the automatic network detection of my printer.
Let's go through the same process again,
but this time I'll add a printer and I'll manually add the printer.
So perhaps for some reason it's not automatically detected.
I don't know under what circumstances that would happen,
but just in case it does, you can add your new printer
and actually specify it's a network printer.
And then choose how you want to connect to the printer,
using which protocol.
Now my printer has a network card in the back of it,
so I'm going to choose this option.
And I type in the network address that my printer is known as on my network.
So this is the TCP/IP network address
and the default port for Jet-Direct cards is 9100,
obviously you need to check your manual for that.
or check the configuration printout that you can usually get from most printers.
Again I go through the printer driver selection.
And again give it some information about my printer,
give it a name, description and location.
As you can see it's pretty straightforward, pretty basic.
Not all printers are like this,
There are some printers which are not particularly well supported.
And in a later screencast we'll look at troubleshooting
and how you can resolve those kinds of issues.
So again, I can right-click this printer,
and choose properties,
and I can print a test page.
And if we grab the webcam again,
you should see another test page come out of the printer.
Apologies for the poor quality of my webcam,
and if we flip that over, that's another test page.
So that works okay.
Now we'll add the printer again,
but what we'll do is this time connect through a Windows machine.
So using an example where you've got a Windows desktop
and the printer is hanging directly off the Windows desktop.
You can share that printer out through Windows printer sharing,
and then connect to that Windows server, that Windows desktop,
from your Ubuntu desktop.
So again I'll go through adding printer,
but this time I'll choose Windows printer, SMB, which is short for Samba.
or can be interpreted as Samba.
Now it's asking me for a user id and password,
it's actually discovered my XP laptop on the network.
And I'll type in a user id and password
that allows it to connect to the XP machine.
Now if there was a domain here, I would prefix that username with a domain.
I'm sure it's possible to skip that step or make that more automated,
but I don't actually know how to do that myself.
Once you've filled in the username and password,
when you hit the drop down on the host it shows my XP laptop hostname and the printer
These are the printers that are shared out by my XP laptop,
So if I just choose the same printer again, the PageMaster,
hit forward and again we go through the same dialog we've seen already.
Give it a printer driver, so we're using the driver on Ubuntu,
we're not using the Windows printer driver to print to this printer.
And again fill in the details about the printer.
So I've said the description is print through a Windows queue,
So there's a printer defined on a Windows machine and it's shared out.
There you can see this printer again if we right-click on it and choose Properties.
Print a test page
and again the trusty webcam...
should show us another page coming out of the printer.
There we go.
So all in all pretty straight forward.
We've seen how to add network printers in various different ways,
on Ubuntu Feisty, which is 7.04
We've also seen how to add printers on Ubuntu Gutsy.
There are plenty more screencasts at our website,
screencasts.ubuntu.com