Bug#987882: Printing does not work on a bullseye install with tasksel gnome

Simon Josefsson simon at josefsson.org
Sat May 1 13:22:44 BST 2021


Package: gnome
Severity: important

I installed bullseye from RC1 and selected the 'GNOME' tasksel.
Printing does not work without 'apt-get install cups'.  In buster, I
selected the 'Print server' tasksel, but that appears to be missing now.
Someone said on IRC that printing is supposed to work by default without
cups, but this does not appear to be the case.

There are two symptoms:

1) Going to GNOME settings and selecting Printer presents an error
message saying the systems printing services aren't available.

2) Attempting to print anything (from, say, gedit) will pop up the
printer dialog, it will find printers on my network, but it stalls
saying 'Getting printer information...', and the Print button is
shadowed and not possible to trigger.

It may be that the solution is really simple, and it may be something
else causing problems on my system alone, but I think having printing
not working by default will give a poor impression of GNOME in Debian so
I'm filing this as an important bug.  If the behaviour is intentional, I
am sorry for wasting time on this.

Symptom 1) make me believe this is not related to the actual printer
that I have.  The printer dialog should be available regardless.
Symptom 2) could be caused by the printer, but since 'apt-get install
cups' resolves this, I don't think it is a printer problem.

FWIW, the printer I have is a HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M479fdw and it
has Just Worked with all GNU/Linux systems I have before.

/Simon
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