If your ThinLinc setup uses a Windows Remote Desktop Servers for some applications, access to printers for these applications is handled automatically by redirection over RDP. When rdesktop is started via tl-run-rdesktop as is the case when applications on Windows Remote Desktop Servers are started via any of the ThinLinc wrapper commands, the list of printers available to the user on the Linux server running the ThinLinc session is automatically fetched. Each printer is then added to the rdesktop commandline in a way that makes it appear in the user's session on the Windows server.
One advantage of this feature is that the Section 5.5, “ Printer Access Control ” will be active even for programs running on Windows Remote Desktop Servers, since only the printers the user are allowed to see and use are exported.
For some special cases, manually configuring printers on the Windows Remote Desktop Server may be required. This is the case for example if some application requires that the name of the printer is exactly the same across sessions, as printers added automatically have names that contain the Windows session ID. For information on how to configure printers manually, see Appendix D, Configuring CUPS queues on Windows Remote Desktop Servers
The same printer driver is used on the Windows Remote Desktop Servers for all printers regardless of model. This limits the amount of settings a user can modify when printing. For example, selecting a different paper tray than the default one is not possible. If these limitations are a problem, defining printer queues manually as described above may be an option.
The automatic redirection of printers to Windows Remote Desktop Servers is enabled by default, but can be disabled by setting /appservergroups/rdp/<appgroup>/redirect_printers to false.
If a user modifies the printer settings for a redirected printer on a Windows Remote Desktop Server, the changes are written to a file named ~/.rdesktop/rdpdr/<printername>/AutoPrinterCacheData.
If changes to printer setttings should be made for all printers, login to the Windows server, make the changes, then wait a few minutes, log out, then copy the generated ~/.rdesktop/rdpdr/<printername>/AutoPrinterCacheData to /opt/thinlinc/etc/rdpdr/<printername>. This must be done for all printers.
The settings file will now be copied to user home directories when tl-run-rdesktop is run. Existing files will not be overwritten, so if printer settings need to be changed, existing files in user home directories must be removed.