Firefox default print DPI fix

Chris — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 03:44:17 +0000

Firefox on my Dad’s machine always wants to print to 300 DPI by default. He can manually change it, but it’s annoying. Other browsers pick up the printer default of 600 DPI and are happy, but not Firefox. He posted a bug on Launchpad for it and then afterwards I found a fix for it upstream in Mozilla’s Bugzilla.

It’s as simple as:

As user, open a shell and enter:
lpoptions -o Resolution=600dpi

This will add a default resolution to ~/.cups/lpoptions

My ~/.cups/lpoptions contains:
Default IP4200 Resolution=600dpi

So anyone who has the same issue, here’s the work around.

Karmic upgrade, broken printing. Workaround.

Chris — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:50:34 +0000

So on another machine (my Dad’s to be exact) after an upgrade to Karmic, both sound and printing were broken.

I fixed the printing issue last night, which was truly strange. The original printer was still there (as I would expect) and could be seen in the GNOME print manager. The problem was that it just wouldn’t print at all. Taking a closer look, for some reason the driver had been reset to “Alps MD-1000″ even though it’s a Samsung.

Changing the driver to anything else and saving the changes did not actually change the driver – it went straight back to “Alps MD-1000.” Adding a new printer resulted in the same problem.

The fix was to log into the CUPS server directly (http://localhost:631) and from here I was able to select the right driver – and it stuck. It could now print correctly.

Going back to the GNOME print manager still shows the driver as being the “Alps MD-1000″ which is just wrong.

So I’m not sure why GNOME print manager is broken, but if I configure the printer directly with CUPS it works.

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Firefox default print DPI fix

Karmic upgrade, broken printing. Workaround.