13.5. Locking Down 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.

Important

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.
You prevent applications from printing by locking down the org.gnome.desktop.lockdown.disable-printing key. Follow the procedure.

Procedure 13.5. Locking Down the org.gnome.desktop.lockdown.disable-printing Key

  1. Create the user profile if it already does not exist (/etc/dconf/profile/user): 
    user-db:user
system-db:local
  2. Create a local database for machine-wide settings in etc/dconf/db/local.d/00-lockdown: 
    [org/gnome/desktop/lockdown]
  
# Prevent applications from printing
disable-printing=true
  3. Override the user's setting and prevent the user from changing it in /etc/dconf/db/local.d/locks/lockdown: 
    # List the keys used to configure lockdown
/org/gnome/desktop/lockdown/disable-printing
  4. Update the system databases by running 
    # dconf update
Having followed these steps, applications supporting this lockdown key will disable printing. Among such applications there are Evolution, Evince, Eye of GNOME, Epiphany, and Gedit.