Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2006 09:44:04 -0800 From: Gary Kline <kline@tao.thought.org> To: Danny Pansters <danny@ricin.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: print question: cups and lpr Message-ID: <20060307174404.GA46892@thought.org> In-Reply-To: <200603071133.02515.danny@ricin.com> References: <20060307082141.GA13694@thought.org> <200603071133.02515.danny@ricin.com>
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On Tue, Mar 07, 2006 at 11:33:02AM +0000, Danny Pansters wrote:
> On Tuesday 7 March 2006 08:21, Gary Kline wrote:
> > On my test system I'm defaulting to "cups"; printing on any
> > flavor of *nix has always been painful ... which is why I
> > stick with plain ol' lpr::: it Just-Works{tm}. So on my
> > printserver and everywhere else I have lpr/lpd going.
> >
> > Under Gnome on my test platform I've tried to get things to
> > print via my printsrver. I see that Gnome thinks things are
> > printing. Not. Do any of you print wizards know what I'm
> > missing?
>
> Usually this is caused by confusion over which lpr to use. The one that comes
> with base (lpd) is in /usr/bin, the one installed by cups is
> in /usr/local/bin. When searching $PATH the first will be used, which is the
> wrong one. IIRC the cups port has a 'make replace' target. Or (what I usually
> do): cp /usr/bin/lpr /usr/bin/lpr.not and I put NO_LPR=yes in /etc/make.conf
> so that when rebuilding world all of lpd is skipped.
Are you saying that, in effect, I should use cups on my
printserver? --or at least use the cups lpr?
>
> > PS: 5 gold stars for anybody who can 'splain why cups exists.
>
> Well for just a printer server lpd is fine and maybe easier. But for a desktop
> where you want a good filter/driver for those shiny PDFs, cups is almost a
> must. I use a HP all-in-one (and before that an officejet). Good luck writing
> a printcap for that. Even more so getting a suitable filter. With cups this
> is automagical, and no sub par quality or bleak colors (well at least with
> HP's drivers, graphics/hpoj and hpijs). Granted, if you fail to get it
> running automagically you're in for some reading, but it's well documented.
> If all you ever do is print plain text then cups may be overkill.
I've got the ghostscript stuff set up for my HP Deskjet-500
(still using since 1992). lpr -> hpif (I think); hpif calls
the ghostscript tools and I can print anything. Postscript,
pdf, graphics, OO files, whatever.
>
> Also, cups supports several protocols, most prominently ipp which arguably is
> the standard now. Since I have my printer hanging on the network this comes
> in handy.
>
> My experience with lpd getting it to print decently with magicfilter on the
> officejet was always rather painful. Cups just works. It also does scanning
> and I can read my camera's flash card with it, but that has nothing to do
> with cups, rather with the device drivers.
>
> HTH,
>
A little, thanks. If I use the cups lpr on my printserver,
will/(*should*) my test server with Gnome and cups just-work,
or is that a black-hole question? Are there are cups type
tutorials around? I haven't googled around.
The nutshell of it is that when I first started messing with
SVR2 in 1986 (then SVR4, then FreeBSD) it took weeks (totaled)
to get things-printer working with lpr/lpd. It's time to get
out of my Ludditeism and move to CUPS.
gary
--
Gary Kline kline@thought.org www.thought.org Public service Unix
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