I have a bq Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition phone, and want to set up printing to my HP wireless printer, connected to my local Wifi network. With my computer running Linux (currently Debian) I am used to use cups, with some graphical interface, but I have found nothing like this on my phone. Is it possible at all to setup printing on Ubuntu Touch?
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Really - can nobody answer this question? Am I the only person who want to be able to print from an Ubuntu Touch device?– Jan Arne FagertunAug 17, 2015 at 7:23
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Unfortunately, it is one thing wanting to print and one completely different thing to actually managed to do so and being able to answer your question ;)– BruniAug 24, 2015 at 18:23
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But you can answer Yes or No to my question?– Jan Arne FagertunAug 25, 2015 at 7:17
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Actually I found no normal way to do this. So NO it is not possible, yet.– eDeviserNov 29, 2015 at 20:04
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Same for me - printing from the device would be awesome. Seems that someone is actually working on the issue. bugs.launchpad.net/canonical-devices-system-image/+bug/1538701– user499182Jan 29, 2016 at 11:38
2 Answers
Using your PC, you can enable your printer through your Google account as a "cloud printer", and then you can print email attachments from your phone.
Well, there's actually a quite tricky solution using your Ubuntu Phone as a cups client. But be carefully following the instructions! If you're not sure about, what you're doing, you may brake your phone (by software) because the following method uses apt, which is expressly not recommended for use on any Ubuntu Touch devices.
Anyway, install Libertine on your phone (indeed working on E4.5 already) executing the instructions from this article on Libertine and create a container. The easiest way to do this is the Libertine app (should appear as a black hat icon after installation) in the App Scope.
After this install the package 'system-config-printer-gnome' in the container. If this doesn't work via the app, use the install command in this ubuntuusers.de article (in German, sorry). This will install all for printing necessary packages including cups.
Then create the directory .cups
in /home/phablet/.local/share/libertine-container/user-data/NAMEOFCONTAINER/
and in the new directory you create the file client.conf
. In this file you enter the following:
ServerName 192.168.2.3
Replace the IP by yours or by the hostname of your cups server. Congrats! You now should see the shared printers from your cups server and be able to print from them from all Libertine(!) apps like LibreOffice (install it if not yet done).
By the way: Scanning is also possible. Just install simple-scan
in your container and attach the IP or HostName of your configured SANE server to the file /home/phablet/.cache/libertine-container/NAMEOFCONTAINER/rootfs/etc/sane.d/net.conf
.