Rocking the blogosphere
Apple Online Store

Getting access to the printer device without sudo

Having recently discovered libinklevel and ink, I’ve been using them to check the status of the ink levels on my Canon i950 printer, connected via USB to my Ubuntu Feisty Fawn box. I’ve been having to run the ink command using sudo so that libinklevel can access the raw device, /dev/usblp0. E.g.:

$ sudo ink -p usb

It’s tedious and easy to forget the sudo though.

Let’s have a look at the permissions on /dev/usblp0:

$ ls -l /dev/usblp0
crw-rw---- 1 root lp 180, 0 Jul 18 06:03 /dev/usblp0

A ha. Users in the lp group can access the device. Let me add myself to the lp group then:

$ sudo -G lp -a marc
(Log out and back in so that my user picks up the new group -
You can verify that you're in the group with the id command)
$ ink -p usb
ink v0.4.1 © 2007 Markus Heinz

Canon i950

Cyan:                          40%
Light Cyan:                   100%
Black:                         10%
Yellow:                        70%
Magenta:                       10%
Light Magenta:                100%

Voila!

Del.icio.us Digg Reddit Technorati

Possibly related posts

Comments

  1. August 7th, 2007 | 12:48 pm

    [...] posted recently (here and here) about libinklevel and mentioned the simple command-line client, simply called [...]

Leave a reply

Apple Online Store
Apple Online Store