[PLUG] Firefox Lost Printers

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sun, 12 Jan 2014 11:13:22 -0800 (PST)
Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> dijo:

>   I thought everything was restored yesterday, but firefox does not
> show any
>printers, only 'print to file' when I want to print a page. None of the
>menus seems to have an item that lets me point firefox to the available
>printers. My web searches, 'how to print from firefox,' 'adding
>printers to firefox,' and similar do not show anything relevant.
>
>   What am I not seeing here?

A couple years ago I needed to switch my old computer from Jaunty to
Debian, and wanted to save time installing printers. This was
especially important to me because I have half a dozen printers in the
house, each with two or three different drivers for various purposes. I
asked on the CUPS listserve and got an answer, copied and pasted below:

-------
On Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:08:59 -0800
Helge Blischke <h.blischke at acm.org> dijo:

> John Jason Jordan wrote:
>   
> > Can I migrate the printers installed in Jaunty to a new, fresh
> > install of Debian testing (Squeeze)?
> > 
> > Specifically, I have eight printers installed in Jaunty for a total
> > of four laser printers that I own. I have so many laser printers
> > because I do short run textbook publishing. Getting all these
> > drivers installed and tweaked was no small task.
> > 
> > When I installed Debian testing I bought a brand new hard disk for
> > my laptop. Then I installed the old Jaunty hard drive in a USB
> > enclosure. I boot to Debian, but everything on my Jaunty hard disk
> > is a click and drag away.
> > 
> > It would be awesome if I could find a folder with my printers in it
> > on my Jaunty hard disk and drag it to the Debian hard disk. Is this
> > possible? If so, how?  
> 
> You could try the following steps:
> 
> (1) make shure your new installation has at least all the filters and 
> backends of your old CUPS installation. If not, install the missing
> ones (maybe it is sufficient to copy the binaries over, but there is
> no guarantee).
> (2) stop the running CUPS
> (3) copy your old /etc/cups/printers.conf to the new installation
> (4) copy the complete contents of your old /etc/cups/ppd directory to
> the new installation
> (5) start your new CUPS
> (6) see what happens.
> 
> It might be that you need to do some tweaking afterwards, but the
> bulk of your old work should have been retained.  

Helge,

A thousand thanks. That worked perfectly. It saved me hours of work.

I did have a couple issues:

1) I have no idea what "all the filters and backends" refers to. I
ignored the instruction and apparently suffered no evil in doing so.

2) I had to google to find out that you stop cups by changing
to /etc/init.d/cups/ and issuing the command ./cups stop, and start
again by the command ./cups start. I add that information here in case
someone else as dumb as me reads this thread in the future.

Thanks again!

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