How To Ubuntu » Printing

How to print a file from your desktop with one click

Eli — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 12:30:55 +0000

Do you have certain files that you print quite often? Would you prefer to be able to just click on a desktop icon, or a panel icon to print the file? This is so much quicker than opening the file in Open Office, Abiword, or whatever, and then printing it.

This is something that’s been very helpful to me. I have several files that I print on a somewhat regular basis. Files which only change every six months or so. Opening up the file, and then printing it can take several seconds, and mouse clicks. With this method, your file can be on its way to the printer in less time than it would take you to open it up. Here’s how you do it.

Before proceeding any further, you need to make sure that you have assigned a default printer for CUPS to use when printing with a command. Please see my post about this, here, to set that up. Now, on to the one click printing.

We’re going to use a panel launcher for this example, though these instructions can be modified to put this launcher on your desktop as well.

Right-click on the panel you want the launcher to appear & select Add to Panel.
Choose Custom Application Launcher, and the Create Launcher box should pop up.
Name your launcher, and give it a comment that will pop up when hovered over by the mouse pointer.
For the command, you’ll need something like this…
lp /home/user/pathtofile
You can click on the little springboard to the left to give your launcher an icon, or not.
Click on OK to finish
Now you have an icon on your panel that will print a file for you with one click of your mouse.

How to print from the command line

Eli — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:40:29 +0000

Printing from the command line can let you get things done very quickly. It can also open up a world of one-click printing of files, which we’ll get into with a future post. So, to get started, navigate to http://localhost:631 in your browser. If you have a default Ubuntu installation, you should now be looking at your CUPS (formerly Common Unix Printing System) page.

Once there you’ll need to go into the Command-Line Printing and Options page. Its here that we find the instructions we need. Now, printing a file from the command line may be as simple as running one command. Here’s what this page has to say about this process.

CUPS understands many different types of files directly, including text, PostScript, PDF, and image files. This allows you to print from inside your applications or at the command-line, whichever is most convenient! Type either of the following commands to print a file to the default (or only) printer on the system:

lp filename lpr filename

If you only have one printer on your system, that’s probably all you’ll need. You may however, have to tell CUPS which is your default printer. CUPS tells us how to do this as well. The first thing you need to do is find out the name of your printer. Here’s how you can do this.

lpstat -p -d

Now you have the name of your printer(s). Choose the one you want to primarily use, with this command.

lpoptions -d printername

Now, when you run your lp or lpr command to print a file, CUPS knows which printer to send the job to. There are tons of other options, all laid out on the Command-Line Printing and Options page. Keep in mind that all of this info assumes that you already have the requisite print drivers installed and configured on your system.

How to set up HP printing on Ubuntu — HP Laserjet P1005

Eli — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 11:40:27 +0000

Some HP printers can use one of the drivers already installed by default in Ubuntu. In those cases, all you usually need to do is plug your printer into your computer, and Ubuntu will recognize it and prompt you to set it up. It’s super quick & easy. The HP Laserjet P1005 that I purchased needed something more. This is a good quality, small, quiet, and cheap ($75 shipped from Newegg) monochrome laser printer. It comes with drivers, Windows drivers of course, which do you no good with Ubuntu. I read that I needed hplip. Turns out that I already had hplip installed on my system by default (which will work for many HP printers), but it didn’t do me any good. I needed to download & install the newest version. Here’s how I did it…

Download the automatic installer file here, the sourceforge page for hplip. Once downloaded follow the instructions on the download page to complete the installation. It will download some more stuff, and then install everything. It will also configure your HP printer. Now you’ll have the HP Device Manager in the Accessories menu, and you’ll also have nice, smooth printing.