Removing KDE Printer Applet warnings, or removing a network printer locally without lpadmin

Question

I'm in a company which has many many network printers that I can see, most of which I never use. I keep getting billions of annoying popups, very frequently, by KDE's Printer Applet:

Printer '<printername>' may not be connected

How can I disable these? I'm happy if it involves removing the printers.

By Googling I can only find that one can use lpadmin -x printername to remove a printer, but this asks me for a password on the remote CUPS server, and I don't have the appropriate rights (presumably this would delete the network printer for everyone in the company?). I do have administrative rights on my computer, so presumably it should be possible for me to remove a printer somehow, just as I can decide to unmount a network drive without unmounting it for everyone?

I also tried doing it via the visual interface but I get "There was an error during the CUPS operation: 'cups-authorization-canceled'", presumably for the same reason as before. I also tried gksudo system-config-printer and removing or disabling the printers there, and this asks me for the password to the CUPS server.

My system is Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS, KDE Printer Applet version 1.8, KDE version 4.8.5.

By the way, I don't want to remove all printers (e.g. disabling all printing wouldn't do), just many of them, I still need to be able to access two of the network printers.

Answer 1

If anyone is interested - I was able to remove the annoying warnings by going to 'Manage Notifications', selecting the Printer Applet and disabling the notifications for it. I know it's a bit silly I didn't find this earlier, but I just expected that 1) I would be able to remove notifications from the applet itself, 2) I would be able to remove unwanted network printers from my PC despite not being an administrator of the CUPS server.