In the old days, printing was really hard in linux. It was one of the things that was a deal breaker when trying to switch from Windows for a lot of people, but when I first tried Ubuntu (probably around 2006-2007) it made all that pain go away! It was easy! A couple of clicks and you could set up a network printer and its been that easy ever since.
Recently Ubuntu have tried to make their settings screen a bit like a Mac, and to simplify everything they seem to be using a simplified user interface for the printer configuration too:
Well this new interface doesn’t work for me, when I try to add a network printer, I get the error message:
FirewallD is not running. Network printer detection needs services mdns, ipp, ipp-client and samba-client enabled on firewall.
Well no matter what I did, I couldn’t add my printer. After some googling around, I found how to get to the old user interface… which actually works! Just type this into a terminal:
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And you will be given this old familiar screen:
Clicking the big “Add” button in this screen and following the steps worked great for me. Another alternative is to use the CUPS web interface on http://localhost:631 but that can be a little more complicated.