WiFi Printers All Disabled?

Question

My two WiFi printers show up but are listed as "Disabled". I cannot find any way to enable them. Any suggestions? They work perfectly on my Linux Mint laptop.

Answer 1

I had the same issue with my WiFi Epson XP332. This is a wrong configured and delivered CUPS-problem. I solved it by changing the cups authorization in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf. I changed the most the settings to "order allow,deny". Then you sholud be able to activate the printer in the settings menu or with usr/sbin/cupsenable PRINTERNAME. Maybe possible that you must reload the CUPS-daemon.

I think is a very huge bug. eOS is told to be user-friendly, so the printing must work out of the box. You cannot annoy new users with such a bitchy printer behaviour.

Answer 2

I just ran into this on elementary OS 6.1, so the issue still remains 2.5 years after this question was asked.

One thing I noticed was that if I add my user to the lpadmin group then I can at least print. The printer still shows as Disabled in the System Settings Printers tool though.

To add yourself to the lpadmin group just do the following:

sudo adduser <YOURNAME> lpadmin

where <YOURNAME> is you account name. You then need to log out and back in again.

Using the CUPS web interface (localhost:631) I can manage the printer just fine after making this change too.

Answer 3

I have this same issue with an HP ENVY 5000 series. It did start working temporarily and I managed to delete the printers marked disabled, but as soon as I ran system-config-printer to rename the Printer description, the disabled one returned. Incidentally you can add the printer using the CUPS web administration http://localhost:631/admin

Oddly I have 2 machines displaying this and they both appeared correctly after installing Thunderbird and Wordpress client, but both have since returned with a Printer listed as disabled. For me it is now just a cosmetic thing in the printer settings