# The Add Printer Wizard for &CUPS;

Clicking on the leftmost icon on the toolbar in the upper part of the window starts the Add Printer Wizard.

This wizard steps you through various screens to install a new printer. At present this Wizard works for &CUPS; and the RLPR environment module. The number of steps depend on the actual print-subsystem which is active and available to you on your box.

## Starting

The welcome screen informs you that you can go back any time to change a setting.

The &kdeprint; wizard introduction screen
The introduction screen of the printer wizard

## Backend Selection

Choose the backend protocol that &CUPS; is supposed to use with your new printer. There are:

- local printer (serial, parallel, USB)

- remote LPD queue

- SMB shared printer (&Windows;)

- Network Printer (TCP, &HP; JetDirect, AppSocket)

- Network printer with &IPP; (&IPP;/HTTP)

- File printer

- serial fax /modem printer

- Class of Printers

If some choices are grayed out, they are not available. For example, you may have no FAX backend software or no modem installed to use it.

Choosing your Printer system
Choosing your Printer System

## Direct Network Setting

The contents of your next screen is dependent on your choice in the previous screen. If you know the details, just type them in to configure your network settings directly.

In other cases the wizard can scan the network for you, to help you decide which setting could be useful.

&kdeprint; wizard network scan
In the &kdeprint; wizard, you can enter network details directly, or you can scan the network automatically.

## Information Retrieval by Scanning the Network

If you use one of the network connections (remote LPD, SMB, remote &CUPS;, network printer with &IPP;), you have an option for scanning the network. Be careful when applying this; in some environments network scanning is considered to be hostile and harmful!

In the case of SMB, &kdeprint; will use the Samba utilities `nmblookup` and `smbclient` (which need to be installed for this to work) to retrieve the information it presents in a tree structure.

In the case of &IPP; (Port 631) and TCP Network/AppSocket (Port 9100) &kdeprint; will try to open the port and, if successful, send an `ipp-get-printer-attribute` request to the printer. For newer &HP; printers the latter usually works, because they support both AppSocket and &IPP;.

Some printers or manufacturers use other port numbers for direct TCP/IP printing. You may need to look up which one to use. The Settings button in the dialog lets you configure your scan, including IP addresses, ports and timeout to use.

Once again: be careful not to be mistaken for an intruder on your network, if you use the scanning technique.

&kdeprint; wizard network configuration dialog
In the &kdeprint; wizard, you can enter parameters to have the wizard scan parts of your network.

## Printer Model Selection

The hardest part is probably the Printer Model Selection. In former years the situation was difficult, because there were hardly any drivers to find. The difficulty now is there are too many; though some of them are very good, many are quite broken.

If you have a current database of available drivers on your system, select the manufacturer in the left part of the window first, then the device model in the right part. This split window shows all &PPD;s found by &CUPS; in its standard repository of installable &PPD;s. This repository normally is `/usr/share/cups/model/`. If you want your driver to be found automatically by &CUPS; and &kdeprint;, place it in there.

## Driver Selection

On the next screen you will see a description of the driver selected previously. This description is extracted from the actual &PPD; used.

For a real &PostScript; printer never try to install a Foomatic or Gimp-Print &PPD;, even if it is offered. You won't be happy with it. Instead find the original &PPD; from the manufacturer, preferably the one written for &Windows; NT and use it.

Some &Linux; distributions have supplied for &CUPS; every possible combination of Ghostscript filters and foomatic &PPD; files they could find on the net. Many of these are quite useless; they were generated a year ago, when the people at www.linuxprinting.org began their first experiments with supplying third party &PPD;s for &CUPS;. Although dubbed Alpha at the time, these started to take on a life of their own and can now be found at various places on the net, doing &CUPS; no favors.

If you are not sure which ones to use go to:

- http://www.linuxprinting.org

- http://www.cups.org

And ask for help. At a later stage, a document detailing the differences between the different driver and &PPD; models will appear at http://kdeprint.sourceforge.net/ Watch out for this!

Via the Other... button you are able to retrieve any &PPD; located somewhere on your available file system.

## Printer Test and Finding the Right Settings

Specify your first driver settings now. The most important one is the default paper size. In many cases this is set to Letter. If you live in an A4 country and don't want your first test page to jam: now is the time to prevent this.

You are ready to start a test print. Hit the Test button.

## Banner Selection

The last but one screen lets you select whether you want banners, and which ones you want to use, to mark the beginning and/or end of every printjob on that printer. You can also select and deselect banners before printing in the job options dialogs.

If you need to use custom banners, copy them into `/usr/share/cups/banners/` to make them available for selection. They must be &PostScript; files, however.

## Finally: Baptizing Your New Printer

The last screen lets you insert a name for your new printer.

The name must start with a letter and may contain numbers and underscores with a maximum size of 128 characters. Conform to this if you want to avoid erratic behavior of your &CUPS; daemon. The printer names in &CUPS; are not case sensitive! This is a requirement of &IPP;. So the names DANKA_infotec, Danka_Infotec and danka_infotec all represent the same printer.

## The Final Confirmation Screen