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Recently I installed latest Inkscape version as snap package and it was all fine until I tried to print something. Only "Print to file" was listed. Any advice on how to get it to see my printer?

metalinspired
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3 Answers3

10

It's not a bug. Snaps run in containers with separate environments which prevent applications to access all the system (as the classic applications do) for security. By default printers are not accessible, but can be enabled with:

sudo snap connect inkscape:cups-control :cups-control

That will allow printers to show in Inkscape. Change inskcape for the name of the application (for example, gimp) if needed. It happened to me with WPS Office: this was my question.

You need to restart the application to take effect.

In my personal opinion, it would be nice if during installation you could specify such permissions or that the applications could decide which permissions requires and let the user know about them (like Android applications).

lepe
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4

By default snaps are confined to the user's $HOME which can lead to some access issues. In this case it seems more a bug or current limitation of the inkscape snap that it can't access the printer.

So atm the snap can be installed with the --classic option to disable confinement.

If snap is already installed then remove

sudo snap remove inkscape

Then install with the option

sudo snap install --classic inkscape

This option will prove useful with other snaps, particularly media players.

doug
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While it may not be a bug. What is a bug is that cups-control doesn't even show up as a connection until you connect to it.

ppetraki@vanguard:~/Sandbox/graphics$ snap connections | grep cups
ppetraki@vanguard:~/Sandbox/graphics$ sudo snap connect brave:cups-control  :cups-control
[sudo] password for ppetraki: 
ppetraki@vanguard:~/Sandbox/graphics$ snap connections | grep cups
cups-control              brave:cups-control                         :cups-control                    manual

So you can't solve the problem until you know what the solution looks like. I was looking for things like "lpr" or "printer" in the list of available connections to no avail. This is on 18.04.

ppetraki
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