therning.org/ magnus

Recently I’ve had some problems with the printers at work. I had it all working just fine a few weeks ago, then I must have upgraded CUPS or something because without me changing the configuration I first lost duplex and then the ability to print black-and-white (it’s a colour printer).

After fiddling with it for a few days finally remembered that foomatic can configure printers. After a few searches I found out how to use it:

1. Find the ID of the printer and what driver to use:

   foomatic-configure -O|less
   

2. Do the configuration:

   foomatic-configure -s cups -n <printer name> -c <printer location> \
   -p <id> -d <driver>
   

   Printer name is anything you want to call the printer. The location is the URI where the printer is found (e.g. ipp://10.70.3.4). The ID and driver comes from step one.

It worked like a charm!