Ubuntu 17.04 - 'printer added' notifications under Gnome

Question

I've just upgraded to Ubuntu 17.04, using the Gnome desktop. Suddenly, I've started seeing 'printer added' notifications as OSD popups - approximately every 2 minutes! It's really distracting.

Anyone have any idea how I can either stop them at source, or at the very least filter them out from the OSD notifications?

Answer 1

The problem that you're identifying appears identical to my case, which is, that upon OS restart, the system goes through an auto-discovery/auto-install process, and then politely notifies the user via a notification window (the OSD, or on-screen display). Yet then--periodically--this process seems to repeat itself for some as yet unknown reason.

Seems to me that somewhere in the new 17.04 driverless printer driver discovery logic, something is broken. The best I can tell is that the colord daemon is failing on a missing ICC file for the printer in question, which causes CUPS to want to "reinstall" the printer driver, and hence the repeating "printer installed" OSD message. Perhaps as a clue, when installing a "non-driverless" printer driver, the corresponding ICC is installed correctly.

In my own case, I've solved the problem by preventing CUPS from initiating this auto-everything process entirely. In this way, I install my printer(s) once, and never see a "printer added" OSD messages again.

The solution:

• Edit /etc/cups-browsed.conf, changing the BrowseRemoteProtocols CUPS dnssd line to BrowseRemoteProtocols none

Note that this assumes your printer(s) are on a LAN and not directly connected to your machine. If your printer is local (physically attached), you may want to edit BrowseProtocols instead (untested).

A restart of the CUPS service or machine reboot should resolve the "printer added" issue. Note that you'll need to manually add your printer(s), as the auto-discovery feature has now been disabled.

CUPS Reference: https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/5-cups-browsed.conf/

Rich

Answer 2

So I thought I had found a solution (via FedoraForums actually):

# Finding the schemas of interest:
$ gsettings list-schemas | grep -i notif

# Listing the values to target:
$ gsettings list-keys org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.print-notifications

# Changing the value:
$ gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.print-notifications active false

Source http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=297053

Unfortunately, despite a brief pause, I'm still getting OSD notifications.