Re: CUPS printing & LPD

In message <e3u34d$g82$2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Unruh <unruh-spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Alan Adams <alan.adams@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

In message <1147256469.125085.294700@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
"magnate" <chrisc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
Unruh wrote:
john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:

Secondly, I am aware you can use http://localhost:631 to bring up the
CUPS printing system, but how do you do this from a networked PC
connected to the LINUX server rather than the main console itself?

Open a web browser and do
http://name.of.the.machine:631
IF you have set up cups to allow remote administration of the cups,
then away you go.

I'm sorry, but that interface is really, really bad. The
redhat-config-printer or system-config-printer tool in more recent RedHat
releases are vastly, vastly superior to the CUPS configuration tool. Eric
Raymond wrote a famous rant about it, years ago, at:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html

So use the config-printer stuff that came with your machine.

That would be System -> Administration -> Printing?

I can't find anything that lets me share the printer. Is it there, or
elsewhere?

Raymond's article was also written 3 years or more ago.

<snip>

The comments
above are brain damaged and putting Win98 on school computers comes close
to criminal negilence. They are so insecure it hurts. Anyone in the world
can hack into them and will school kids start messing about with them.
Really bad idea.

A good half of the school computers are Win98 anyway. I agree about
the probable instability, which is why I've got a master clone disk -
20 minutes and they'll be back as day 1.


I have managed to acquire a bunch of computers for a school, to
replace some wornout old workhorses which mainly browsed the internet,
and occasionally ran some Office applications. Because they had no

AAAARGH. Why not just leave a few guns with bullets lying around as well.
I'm sure the kids will love playing with them.

How do you kill anyone with a computer? Drop it from an upstairs
window I suppose. The school is single-storey.



installed operating system, but were licensed to use Windows98 I had a
choice - Linux or Wndows98.

Unfortunately I also needed to set up a printer on one of them and use
it from all of them. Looking into how this might be done, I couldn't
get a glimmer of where to start.

Setting up a printer is NOT hard. And cups does have the tremendous
advantage that that one printer is advertised to all of the other machines.
For any reasonable distro, there are printer setup tools, as mentioned
above. The cups setup tools are frustrating, I will admit, but they are NOT
all there is. I suspect you never even tried to install anything.

I could not find any CUPS setup tools. What should I be installing?
How am I supposed to find out about this - the man pages are obscure
(which is being polite.)

They are now running Windows98, Open Office and Firefox.

The discussion I have just read leads me to believe that trying to set
this up to run effectively unattended is not worth the hassle.

No, after all it is not you that will be hurt.

It will be - I'll get called in to fix it when it breaks. At least I
know how to do that on Windows


My first frustration with CUPS came when I tried to print from Firefox
to my Laserjet5M. I had the laserjet set up using Postscript - because
the greyscale was far superior to that produced using PCL. However
Firefox complained that the printer was one point revision too low for
it, and I had to install some filter or other in CUPS.

Without a decent error message it is almost completely impossible to know
what you are talking about.

The error message was printed on the printer, so I will attempt to
type it in verbatim:

The Postscript interpreter in your printer is 2014.108
This printour requires at least version 2015 or greater
To make a Unix/Linux Gecko Browser (eg Netscape or Mozilla) produce
output that will work on any level 2 interpreter change the "Print
Command" to use ghostscript to convert the output down to basic level
2: eg change the print command from
lpr [OPTIONS]
to (all on one line)
gs -q -sDEVICE=pswrite -sOutputFile=- -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH
-dMozConvertedToLevel2=true -l lpr [OPTIONS]

it then goes on with similar suggestions for printing to/from a file.

Unfortunately there isn't much of a clue about whete to find the
command which needs changing - is it inside Firefox, or part of CUPS -
or somewhere else?

The printer is back on PCL.

So now those kids have vastly inferior printing as well. Wow.

No, this is my home printer.



The point being that I hadn't used the CUPS config files to set it up,
I just used whatever GUI Ubuntu had provided. I don't want to mix GUI

So?

and config file editing (especially after reading the article) and I
certainly don't want the grief of doing it all by editing config
files. (Especially in a modal editor - and the only way I have found
to use a decent editor on a config file is to log in as root. SU only
lets me use the abomination called vi ( or is it vim, which to me is
an abrasive cleaner - now there's an appropriate thought). )

???? No idea what you are talking about. vi is a quick efficient editor,
but some do not like it. So use one of the 10000 others. And if you su to
root and then type in the name ( eg kedit /etc/passwd)
there you go, you have a gui editor under root. You do not have to use the
little icons to do everything.

But if Linux is ever going to move out of a geek niche into the
mainstream, then I would suggest that is an essential change - the
icons are important.


--
Alan Adams, from Northamptonshire
alan.adams@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.nckc.org.uk/
.

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