Spent quite a bit of time this morning getting my workstation to print the invoice from Friday. The great news is that kdeprinter is able to do the entire setup for an SMB printer from a little wizard. Not quite point-and-click yet (wasn't able to browse for the printer or machine name, for instance), but if you know the host and printer name fairly straightforward.

The "grr"-inducing news is that if you have a permissions problem (because, for instance, you started the wizard from the KPDF dialog where you are trying to print something) the wizard tells you it couldn't create a "temporary" printer when doing a test print, then bombs out at the end telling you you don't have the permissions required to access the printer.

That has nothing to do with having the wrong password for the host. Turns out that kdeprinter doesn't know to ask for superuser permissions in order to set up the printer you've just created (or, for that matter, to tell you to use a superuser version of the wizard, or for that matter, to only show the wizard to superusers). The "temporary" is just a red herring, it's not that the wizard creates a user-level printer for testing before creating the admin-level one.

With that tidbit of information the entire process would have been about 10 minutes including poking the holes through the intermediate firewall. Took about 1 hour and 45 minutes to complete with debugging things that were actually working. I wound up just crashing after the frustration of realising that (I'm going to be up all night anyway, so not too far from the plan for the day).

So, for all those wanting to set up a printer under KDE: go through the control center. Do not just click on the handy-dandy wizard icon in your favourite application!