Automatic Network Printer Detectoin

[lewisforlife]

Does Mageia have the ability when adding a printer to automatically detect network printers. I was just using Mint (for the first time), and when adding a network/wireless printer, it automatically detects all printers on the network and you can choose from the list. It would be nice to have this ability in one of the releases.

Currently you not only have to know the ip address to add a printer, but you have to know what protocol to use (ipp, lpd, http, socket etc...). Most printer manuals don't even tell you what protocol to use, so it makes very difficult (in my opinion) to set a printer up. Is there anyway to add the functionality that comes with standard in Mint?

[doktor5000]

Actually when using the CUPS web frontend http://127.0.0.1:631/ -> Management -> Add printer it also searches for network printers.
What tool does Mint use for detecting and setting up printers?

[lewisforlife]

I am sure mint uses CUPS, but I was thinking that it was their front-end (gui program) that was doing the searching. I will try to find out the name of there program. I am glad to hear that cups does this, because when I used the Mageia frontend under "Mageia Control Center", printers are not automatically found, unless I am not using this tool correctly.

[lewisforlife]

When I just used CUPS, printers were not found automatically. It sounds like it is finding your network printers though with no problem. I had to set mine up manually even through cups just now.

[martinw]

Do you have a firewall enabled? If so, you need to allow CUPS through the firewall. If I remember right, you have to do this on both the server and the client machine for automatic detection to work.

[lewisforlife]

I think the frontend for Mint/Gnome is the Gnome-control-center, this tool automatically finds printers. The one that comes with Mageia does not, or at least it is not working for me. CUPS is not automatically detecting my printer either. I guess I have to open a port on my firewall according to martinw, but this is not required on Mint, I wonder why.

Configuring printers is something that seems like it should be easy, but it gets rather complicated when you have to know protocols/ipaddresses/queues.

[lewisforlife]

Interestingly enough system-config-printer is a program present on both mageia, and mint.

In mageia, system-config-printer does not automatically detect my networked Epson nx420, but on my mint computer, system-config-printer does find it automatically. So something is obviously configured differently on my mageia computer, if anyone has any ideas, let me know. I have not made any default changes to my firewall.

--edit--

Mint is using system-config-printer 1.3.6, cups 1.5.0-8
Mageia is using system-config-printer 1.3.1, cups 1.4.6

I wonder if this version number could be why mageia is not detecting my printer, but Mint is.