How to add printers in Wine

If you search on the Internet for “how to install printers on Wine”, practically all the results will call you an idiot: “you can’t install printers on Wine, the system does it automatically”.

It must mean that I’m an idiot, because they don’t appear to me!

Actually, the problem is that Linux is usually installed in 64-bit, and it is usually recommended to run programs in Wine in a 32-bit prefix.

So, by default, no printers appear!

So you need to install the 32-bit CUPS library (CUPS is the print manager in Linux).

In Ubuntu, it is done like this:

sudo apt install libcups2:i386

While we’re at it, you can also add a PDF printer by adding:

sudo apt-get install printer-driver-cups-pdf

and then in the printer panel insert a new printer that has as address:

cups-pdf:/

Like all “typical Linux” things (not very friendly…), when a document will be sent to this printer, it seems that nothing happens, nothing appears on screen, no confirmation. But, actually, a file is saved in ~/PDF (in the home directory). You have to be careful because it decides the name of the file automatically and it happened to me many times printing from Wine that the file was overwritten.

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