Hello, On Nov 20 00:01 Peter Taylor wrote (shortened):
Does it hang when printing (because there is no cupsd running) or does it hang in general? No, the wrapper script was hanging, apparently because of the cupsd problem.
OpenOffice uses CUPS for printing. In particular OpenOffice builds its internal list of selectable queues by asking the available queues from CUPS only once when OpenOffice starts and not each time when printing. This is not in perfect compliance to the CUPS design. Because the "Browsing" stuff in CUPS makes it possible that new queues appear and other queues may vanish at random time. But OpenOffice's internal list of selectable queues would not change accordingly.
But in looking at the Administration manual, I am confused about when the KDE printing configuration should be set to CUPS and when it should be set to "Print Through an External Program (generic)". It is currently set to CUPS. Why would I want to change this?
When you use CUPS as your printing system then the KDE printing configuration should be set to CUPS. This way the list of selectable queues in KDE applications should be always up to date (perhaps with some seconds delay) according to the existing queues in CUPS. But if you don't want to print via one of the existing CUPS queues, them you must switch the KDE printing tool to "Print Through an External Program". In particular if there is a CUPS queue "foo" which is accessible on a CUPS server "bar" but the CUPS server does not broadcast the queue then you can print via the command: lp -d foo -h bar KDE printing tool and OpenOffice: In OpenOffice there should be a "printer" called "kprinter". If you use this "printer" in OpenOffice then OpenOffice's print job would be forwarded to kprinter and then kprinter's dialog would pop up and you can select the queue and all the other settings there. This way you get the same printing dialog in OpenOffice and KDE. But in the past there have been in some special cases problems that OpenOffice and/or StarOffice may hang up when an external graphical printer dialog tool (like kprinter or xpp or gtklp) was called. I was never able to reproduce this. All what I noticed was that after the external dialog has popped up "over" the OpenOffice/StarOffice window you can select the OpenOffice/StarOffice window and then the OpenOffice/StarOffice window gets the mouse focus and pops up in the foreground and hides the external dialog window. As the OpenOffice/StarOffice process is waiting for the external dialog process nothing happens when clicking anything in the foreground OpenOffice/StarOffice window. For an unexperienced user this may look as if OpenOffice/StarOffice has hung up. But after you managed that the external dialog window gets the mouse focus back (the only problem is that this window is hidden by the OpenOffice/StarOffice window) everything works well. Regards, Johannes Meixner ----------------------------------------------------------- SUSE LINUX AG, Deutschherrnstr. 15-19 Mail: jsmeix@suse.de 90429 Nuernberg, Germany WWW: http://www.suse.de/ -----------------------------------------------------------