Printing & Scanning

System 2026-08-21

Shanios ships a complete printing and scanning stack out of the box — CUPS, a wide range of vendor drivers, and driverless IPP/network scanning support are all pre-installed and active from first boot. No package installation is needed to add most printers or scanners.

What's Pre-Installed

Print system: CUPS 2.4 with cups-filters, cups-pdf (print-to-PDF), cups-browsed (automatic network printer discovery), cups-pk-helper (Polkit integration for GUI printer management), ipp-usb (driverless IPP-over-USB for AirPrint-capable printers)
Drivers: hplip-minimal (HP), cnijfilter2 (Canon), brlaser (Brother laser), foo2zjs-nightly (various ZjStream-based printers), gutenprint and splix (broad generic/open-source coverage), the full Foomatic database (foomatic-db, foomatic-db-engine, foomatic-db-ppds, foomatic-db-gutenprint-ppds) for wide legacy driver coverage, plus ghostscript, gsfonts, and a2ps for PostScript/text rendering
Scanning: SANE-based, with sane-airscan for driverless network scanning (eSCL/AirScan and WSD), plus colord-sane and argyllcms for scanner colour profiles
GUI apps: GNOME Simple Scan / KDE Skanlite for scanning; printer management is built into each desktop's Settings app (KDE Plasma's is provided by print-manager, integrated into System Settings and showing a print-queue icon in the system tray while jobs are active); system-config-printer is also available for advanced CUPS configuration

cups.socket, cups-browsed.service, saned.socket, and ipp-usb.service are all enabled by default — nothing to turn on manually.

Adding a Printer

GUI (recommended):

GNOME: Settings → Printers → Add Printer
KDE Plasma: System Settings → Printers → Add a New Printer

Both auto-discover printers on the local network via cups-browsed (mDNS/DNS-SD through Avahi) and USB-connected printers via ipp-usb. For most modern printers, discovery and driver selection happen automatically.

CLI / advanced: CUPS also exposes a local web UI at http://localhost:631 for adding printers, managing queues, and tweaking driver options — useful when you need PPD-level control the GUI doesn't expose. system-config-printer provides a more traditional standalone GUI for the same tasks.

# List configured printers
lpstat -p -d

# Add a printer manually with a specific driver (rarely needed — GUI/auto-discovery covers most cases)
sudo lpadmin -p MyPrinter -E -v ipp://192.168.1.50/ipp/print -m everywhere

Managing Print Jobs

# Print a file
lp document.pdf
lp -d MyPrinter -o sides=two-sided-long-edge document.pdf

# View the print queue
lpq
lpstat -o

# Cancel a job
lprm <job-id>
cancel <job-id>

# Pause / resume a printer
cupsdisable MyPrinter
cupsenable MyPrinter

Scanning

GUI: Simple Scan (GNOME) or Skanlite (KDE) — both detect USB and network scanners automatically via SANE and sane-airscan.

# List detected scanners
scanimage -L

# Scan from the command line
scanimage --format=png -o scan.png --resolution=300

# Driverless network scanner discovery (eSCL/AirScan) is handled by sane-airscan automatically

If a network scanner doesn't appear, confirm it's on the same subnet and that Avahi/mDNS traffic isn't being blocked — see Firewall (firewalld) if you've added custom rules.

Groups & Permissions

New users are automatically added to the cups, lp, and scanner groups at creation time via /etc/shani-extra-groups — see User Provisioning for the full mechanism. No manual group changes are needed for printing or scanning to work for a normal user account.

Troubleshooting

| Issue | Solution | |-------|----------| | Printer not discovered | Confirm it's on the same network/subnet; check cups-browsed is running (systemctl status cups-browsed); check the CUPS web UI at localhost:631 | | USB printer not detected | Check lsusb; confirm ipp-usb.service is running for AirPrint-capable USB printers | | Wrong or missing driver | Check the CUPS web UI's driver search — the Foomatic/Gutenprint databases cover most non-vendor-specific printers; some vendor drivers (e.g. Epson) are not pre-installed and must be added manually | | Print jobs stuck in queue | cupsenable <printer> if paused; check journalctl -u cups for filter errors | | Scanner not detected | Run scanimage -L; for network scanners, confirm sane-airscan supports the device's protocol (eSCL/AirScan or WSD) | | Can't manage printers without a password prompt every time | This is expected — cups-pk-helper gates printer administration via Polkit; see Permissions & Authorization |