Disable printing

You can disable the print dialog from being shown to users. This can be useful if you are giving temporary access to a user or you do not want the user to print to network printers.

This feature will only work in applications which support it! Not all GNOME and third party applications have this feature enabled. These changes will have no effect on applications which do not support this feature.

Disable printing

  1. Create the user profile which contains the following lines:

    /etc/dconf/profile/user

    user-db:user
    system-db:local

    local is the name of a dconf database.

  2. Create the directory /etc/dconf/db/local.d/ if it does not already exist.

  3. Create the key file /etc/dconf/db/local.d/00-printing to provide information for the local database.

    /etc/dconf/db/local.d/00-printing

    # Specify the dconf path
    [org/gnome/desktop/lockdown]
     
    # Prevent applications from printing
    disable-printing=true
  4. To prevent the user from overriding these settings, create the file /etc/dconf/db/local.d/locks/printing with the following content:

    /etc/dconf/db/local.db/locks/printing

    # Lock printing settings
    /org/gnome/desktop/lockdown/disable-printing
  5. Update the system databases:

    # dconf update
  6. Users must log out and back in again before the system-wide settings take effect.