Printing: Unable to rename printer

are you using dapper flight6 release?

and by the way you can only change printer description not its name.

The biggest problem with this bug is that there is no place to ever name the printer. Gnome-cups-manager assigns a name when you set up the printer and it cannot be changed.

You are right, I mixed up the name with the description of the printer since they are always equal. The only difference is that you can change the description in the printer properties dialoque but this change is always lost when you close the dialoque.

Fazit: It would be nice to have an possibility to change the text shown below the printer icon in the printer overview or list.

I will take back my comment above. While confirming that another bug was fixed, I noticed that Step 3 now allows you to initially name a new printer.

Kuropka can you confirm that new updates fix your problem?

Thank you, it fixes 50% of the problem.

The changes in the of the description and location in the printer properties dialoque are retained now. (These are the fixed 50%)

However the printer overview shows still only the not changeable printer name. So the description and location are more or less useless.

By the way, why it is not possible to change the printer name?

This is a problem of the CUPS interfaces. They do not support renaming print queues. So a frontend cannot simply rename the queue by sending an IPP request to the CUPS daemon.

The frontend would need to access the CUPS config files directly to rename the queue in /etc/cups/printers.conf, rename the PPD file and rename possible entries related to this queue in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf and /etc/cups/lpoptions. After that the CUPS daemon needs to be restarted to get note of the changes.

Another possibility is to delete the print queue and then create a new one with the new name and the same configuration. "foomatic-configure" can copy queues with the "-C" option. This way one can create the new queue and afterwards one deletes the old one.

If a frontend is not capable of this, the queue name should not be shown as an editable input field, this is the bug.

We have changed the default print management system in Ubuntu from gnome-cups-manager to system-config-printer. Please re-open this bug if you still have this problem with system-config-printer (Gutsy or Hardy). Thanks!

Is there any workaround for this? I am trying to rename printer in Ubuntu by editing /etc/cups/printers.conf . And it works until I reboot machine ... After I reboot machine, my Ubuntu can't print any pages. If I go to dialogs "printers", I see the button "print test page" as disabled. I am using Ubuntu 9.10.

The reason I am trying to rename printer is because I have a dual boot machine which can load Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10. When I am in Windows, the printer is seen on my shares as EPSON BX300F Series . When I am in Ubuntu, it is seen on my share as EPSON-Stylus-Office-BX300F.

In my network I have another machine, which is using the printer which is attached to my machine. And because the printer names are different I see two instances of printer in it. It is a mess which is confusing those stupid windows users ...

Please help!

Up? Anyone has an idea on how to resolve this?

OK, I solved this problem by renaming printer in Windows, not in Ubuntu. Pity you can't easially rename it in Ubuntu.

For manually changing the printer name in current Ubuntu (12.04),
in addition to editing the name in /etc/cups/printers.conf
you need to rename the respective .ppd file in /etc/cups/ppd/

Alternatively, you may simply use the GUI.
Go to System Settings -> Hardware | Printers,
select the printer, click on its name, and edit it.

You may also point your browser at http://localhost:631/printers
to configure your printer, but I did not find a 'rename' option there.

The issue persists in 2019 with Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS (GNOME Shell 3.28.3).

It's a shame that this issue has been around for 9 years and status 'Won't Fix'. It's quite a simple thing but still relevant. It's quite hard to make out the correct printer with the name 'Unknown' in the list of unknown printers...

Is there any way to get this fixed?