Tuesday, February 7. 2006

Bringing Back the KDE Printer Manager to SuSE Linux

If you always used SuSE Linux and never compiled KDE by yourself, you may have missed one of the most powerful KControl applets: The KDE Cups Printer Manager. It's way more convenient than the cups web interface at localhost:631 and more powerful than that what SuSE wants you to use, the YaST Printer configuration dialog. E.g. the YaST applet is unable to stop and start the printer queues and both, web interface and YaST, cannot configure special printers for KPrinter.

However I was able to live with the YaST thing and managed to work around its quirks for a while. But KDE is able to do more with kprinter. There are special printer queues only known to kprinter that can perform actions like sending files as PDF, faxing files, exporting to PDF or Postscript and so on. After upgrading a SuSE 9.1 system to SuSE 10 I got three different special printers all sending a PDF file via Email, two that sends a fax and two that exports it to PDF. To be able to manage these special printers you need the good old KDE Printer Manager control applet. SuSE does a good job to hide it.

kcmshell --list

does no longer list it, but it's still there. It can be launched by running kcmshell printmgr. To bring it back into the Control Center run kcontroledit (which is like kmenuedit, just that it works for the control center instead of the KDE applications menu). See this screenshot for more information: