Re: LPR and CUPS

On Fri, Sep 21, 2007 at 12:20:08PM +0900, Miles Bader wrote:
Andrew Sackville-West <andrew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
my dirty little secret is that I've *never* had trouble with CUPS and
don't understand all the problems that people have. Some of it I think
is just inertia (used lp* for a long time why should I change) which
is perfectly reasonable, IMO. And I do agree with those who think that
there are many printing solutions and the heavy use of cups as a
dependency is not a good thing.

So... what type of printer setup do you use?

I've got 5 machines with two printers. all are running debian or some
derivative (knoppmyth). The two printers are both cheap inkjets (one
canon, one hp) hanging off of desktop machines.

I run a debian machine at work where all the printers are "network
attached" (some are hanging off of unix machines, some have their own
print server builtin).

Windows machines seem to find all these printers "magically", but none
of the debian printing systems I've tried (CUPS, LPRng) has ever worked
worth a damn in this environment -- they don't seem to find printers
advertised on the net like windows machines do, and even adding printers
to /etc/printcap (with lprng) doesn't work like the documentation says
it should.

Most of the help I've seen on the net for CUPS etc assumes that you have
a printer directly attached to your machine (and I get the impression
that this is the focus of development).

I've basically given up on printing from my debian machine; I just login
to the sunos server and use lpr when I need to print something...

I have used just the stock configuration of cups, using the stupid
clicky interface through localhost:631, and have had zero trouble printing
from any machine to any printer. Note though that I've not tried all
combinations.

My comment was based on the continuous low level of mails from people
who have trouble getting even basic functionality working with cups
and the string of old fogeys (you know who you are!) who are fighting
cups and often seem to be losing the battle. (Note please that there is
no judgement in my statements, and I will fight to the end for people
to choose not to use cups). I'm baffled by the source of this
continued trouble, though I don't deny its existence.

A

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