Typical, after my last post extolling the virtues of how easy it was to install a printer in Ubuntu I hit a problem today.
The symptoms are that you go to do a printer administration task, like add a printer, either through the gnome print manager or cups/cupsd web interface you get and a challenge box: “Password Required” “Password or someuser on localhost?”. You will try all manner of combinations but it keeps coming up.
Reinstalling cups doesn’t help, you seem to have the default /etc/cups/cupsd.conf.
It transpired that the critical lines are:
# Administrator user group... SystemGroup lpadmin
Then the penny dropped – I wasn’t in the lpadmin group. I added myself and we all lived happily ever after.
I should say that this wasn’t on a recent install of Ubuntu – this machine has effectively had 3 upgrades since it was first installed, so that’s its get out of jail free card.
