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Apple Licenses CUPS
bmeteor writes: "Short and very sweet: CUPS is licensed by Apple. A boon for both Apple and GNU." CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) is a system based on the Internet Printing Protocol for standardized printing on Unix systems. That's nice, but when can I print over the network to my Epson inkjet, like I can in Mac OS 9 with USB Printer Sharing?
Now all they need is something that will let you browse windows shares.
Free Mac Mini
I used it around '98 or '99, and it got the job done for me.
I hope Apple has success -- the PrintManager and the printing architecture in general is a significant weakness of OS X. Printing for me typically entails making a PS or a PDF and moving it to my NeXT for printing or FAXing. It's too much of a bother to deal with the OS X printing tools.
And I can't share my USB printer, which is just stupid. Neither by NetInfo or by SMB, or by LPR.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Setup is easy and the quality is on par with Windows' output.
If i'm not mistaken OS X can already access smb shares and it probably wouldn't be too hard to get something like xsmbrowser running on it. If you want to browse and access smb shares on OS 9 there is a product called Dave that makes them show up in the Chooser. Dave is commercial payware but it does work very well.
Personally as a web designer, I'm sick to death of every man and his dog trying to make everything look like aqua... Must bring a smile to Steve's face though :)
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
More to the point, what were you going to say that made you hit the reply button?
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Any attempt by any company to introduce new technologies that are based on standards and that provide a means to work well with any and every platform should be considered a plus for the industry. We must get past the platform specific train of thought and focus on systems that make the platform you choose simply a personal choice and not one that will limit your ability to be productive.
IPP is the way of the future. It provides a mechanism to connect any and every printer in the world together with any delivery mechanism. The possibilities of providing a common printing mechanism are astounding. Imagine doing away with low quality fax machines and being able to send a secure and private document around the world directly to someone's desk. Imagine sending a birthday card to Grandma right to her living room. Imagine printing from a wireless device while walking down the street to a printer at a print shop ready to pick up!
Forget snail mail and faxing IPP is the only way to go!
just do the steps listed in the hint at Mac OS X Hints.
Non impediti ratione cogitationis.
This is definitely great news. I think this will be a big positive, especially for Apple in higher education and big biz.
I agree, but for different reasons. Now that CUPS will have an installed base as large as Apple's, printer vendors will start supporting it. It should also encourage other Unix vendors to start supporting it as their default printing mechanism. Maybe we'll finally see the last of lpsched and lpd?
We're currently using it at my workplace to print to both HP and Lexmark printers. Our Solaris, Linux and NT 4.0 machines all print through it. The only limitation we have seen is that the PS that comes from Windows is not able to be counted correctly in the page_log (i.e. you print a 756 page document and it only shows up as one page). I believe there's a workaround for this that we're looking into, but otherwise it's a good solid platform that we rely on in production.
I just recently became aware of OMNI, a unix printing system by IBM based off Ghostscript. It seems very comprehensive, they list support for *610* printers.
What struck about this is that I thought CUPS was pretty well-agreed upon by the major players as a common unix (the CU in CUPS) standard. How does OMNI compare with CUPS? Or do they perhaps represent different levels of the whole printing system and do they compliment one another?
And why can he post stuff to the frontpage?
Pudge is Chris Nandor. Long-standing MacPerl person, and now working for OSDN by the looks of things. The story was posted to the Apple section first, and presumably made it to the front page from there.
-dair
Apple is only licensing CUPS from the copyright holder (Easy Software Products) to get around the GNU restrictions, so a proprietary version can be distributed without source.
"The standard CUPS distribution will be provided with Apple's open source Darwin operating system, while an enhanced version of CUPS with Apple's Aqua user interface will be provided with MacOS X."
Is the OS X Server an X server? ;-)
--
The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
Does this mean OS X will finally support PCL?
:-)
I can't speak on OS-X (as I've never used it yet), but i can say that I have a HP-5000 and on of their ink jets (I honestly forget teh model number at the moment), and with Linux (using CUPS) I print to them as a RAW device. It's flwless.
On a similar note, I got my Lexmark Z52 printing from my Linux box here at home just a couple days ago. And no, I'm not using Lexmarks stuff to do it. Just CUPS.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
I have thought that you could set up a printer (even a USB printer) to be shared using NetInfo. Granted, this is the supposition of one who has never done it (but never needed to). I think it might explain how in here : ftp://mAnuals.info.apple.comApple_Support_Area/Man uals/software/UnderstandingUsingNetInfo.PDF
I apologize if I am wrong and get people's hopes up. If I am wrong, just look at this as a fascinating document on how NetInfo works.
The Finite
Boom Shanka
It seems that the company that wrote cups has a interesting business model. It is licensing CUPS to non-GPL friendly companies (EG. Anything that is not a Linux distro.) , and that is how it plans to make money. Apple like most of the *BSD's, prefers to touch GPL software with a ten foot pole.
I've got a couple of these Lantronix MPS servers and they work great. Support for LPD, AppleTalk, and LanManager. All your network printing needs in one tiny little device.
And no, I don't work for them, I'm just a very happy customer.
P.S. I just noticed on my preview page the aqua-colored 3d-ish looking gradient bars instead of normal slashdot green. I don't like them.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Gee.. what planet do you live on?
Printing (and seting up printing) is totally effortless. There's no mystery there. And if your trouble is worth printing to PS or PDF to then move it to you NeXT to print it, then I strongly suggest you try CAPer. It'll let you "export" your printer onto the AppleTalk network (over IP) and use it on your Mac. This is what I do with my N2000 printer on my NeXT Cube.
Granted, faxing is still a pain in OS X. Though, ease them with Cocoa eFax. It grabs your files and faxes them, and can also receive faxes.
Like any other 'net resource the spammers & maladjusted will attempt to abuse IPP. Unsolicited Commercial Email, Mail Bombs, and Junk Faxes are problems today; Drive-By-Printings could be tomorrow.
Instead of coming home to 30 flyers advertising take-out places your printer would pump them out continuously along with guaranteed penis enhancements, herbal highs, the latest in puppy porn, and of course a thousand pages of solid black from the dork you belittled on /. last week. Or you'll end up having to write elaborate filters for your incoming queue (procqueue anyone?) previewing everything before allowing it to go through, blocking off known printer-jacking domains.
No, IPP is great inside a facility and between sites that cross-print a lot but I expect email will remain the standard way of distributing a document. Email is widely deployed, directories are already in place, it can be encrypted & authenticated, uses a store-and-forward architecture, doesn't require the output device be known or any drivers required. The recipient need only have an application capable of printing the document and there are any number of good formats running from the "business-standard" MS Word to Adobe Acrobat to HTML/XML pages on down to good old flat text - ASCII or Unicode.
Indeed while many print shops take jobs online none I'm aware of accept random ones without pre-arranged accounts. Then most of the time they specify the formats one can HTTP-upload to them or send via a custom print driver in their format (presumably some PostScript or HPGL variant with headers for job identification, output settings, and accounting.)
So while CUPS and IPP are great things and are definitely making the world more interoperable (Unix & varients, Win2k+, MacOS X, lots of newer printers & print servers) they're not going to revolutionize it any more then standard print queues, Windows Shares, MacOS Printer Sharing, Novell Distributed Print Services, iPrint, etc.
ps Anyone know of an IPP implementation in PostScript? Might be a great way to "upgrade" all of these older devices with a single loaded print job.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
...and using an HP ethernet printer, everytime I want to print to the darn thing, I need to reset the printer (known HP driver bug that has lasted for about 3 months now.)
I had a way more positive experience on OS 9 with printer discovery and sharing. AppleTalk on OS X is just slow and broken.
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
You could try the alpha version of my own printing system which I've written in Perl after three attempts to get CUPS to work ended in failure. I use it to print across the network to my Epson S.P. 1290.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Funding Free Software development by selling non-Free licenses is a perfectly reasonable and good action; the revenues from this, remember, will in large part go to pay the folks who write the Free version.
Mac OS X printing is not based on OS9 printing at all.
Mac OS X native printing uses PDF as the spool file format and uses completely different drivers than OS9 - this is why many older printers are supported in Classic, but not native Mac OS X.
It works, I'll give you that. (At least when it sees my Epson USB printer.)
Most of my problems are related to my printer -- I have a POS LaserJet 6L. To print to it with the NeXT machines, I have to use JetPilot, which is a great app (www.ipc.de), but it has major issues interoperating with LPR and not pure-NeXT printing approaches.
In any event, it doesn't matter, as I'm in the process of getting a LaserJet 4 to serve as an apartment printer.
WRT the faxing, I'm much happier moving the files to the NeXT and faxing them -- I haven't found an integrated, computer-based faxing system that comes close to the built-in NeXT fax tools. I have no desire to have my Mac do anything about FAXing.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Why on earth would you want to use Appletalk at all? Add the printer by entering the IP address for goodness sakes. And if the HP drivers make your job choke try using the generic drivers.
Best of luck.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
versiontracker, learn it, love it.
Just a thought; spam, fax spam and the like wouldn't be so prevalent if nobody ever responded to them.
I don't know who is. Maybe someone's Grandma really is buying all this viagra, drug alternatives, long distance, cellular services, satellite dishes, descramblers, life insurance, gambling, banned porn and getting killer toner deals with free vacation giveaways while making $1500-20,000 a week from home on their free stock tips.
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
CUPS and Cocoa? Wouldn't that mean hot chocolate for every OSX user?
Yes, but beware. They burned it a bit. Thus all the Carbon.
____ _______
Duty now for the future!
Well, they're certaintly not encouraging anyone to port their OSX apps to Linux or BSD. I wouldn't mind Quicktime player or iTunes or iPhoto or iDVD or Aqua or their Display PS drivers or Applescript on Linux, and this doesn't even touch on encouraging third parties to port their apps over. Granted, they've got the Darwin stuff and QT Streaming Server, but that doesn't help us all that much. Hell, all the Darwin people are just running XFree anyhow.
This brings up a fairly interesting point though. Why is it that we as a community don't encourage ports to Linux? When we lack an app, it's always a replacement we want. I just downloaded a game called "egoboo" for Linux, and it's a really nicely done 3d nethack type game. When I opened up the readme file though, it said it was for Direct3D! Someone has ported a great piece of work for the community. Why don't we encourage more people to write their programs using Qt and OpenGL and SDL so that we can make use of them too? Shareware/Freeware authors want a wide audience, and encouraging the use of cross-platform stuff could be a real boon to us all. Perhaps a motion to do this is what we need to start with? I mean, Apple sure as hell isn't going to encourage anyone to port stuff to Linux, we'll have to do it ourselves.
What do you guys think? I know classically, Linux versions of apps generally suck, like the Kazaa Linux crap for instance. But what about other programs? I'd love to see Triallian personally. Any thoughts?
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Were you dropped as a child? Repeatedly? Oxygen deprivation? Poor nutrition? What? GIVE so we can prevent other dumbasses like you!
I've got a mac.com email address 'cause it's a decent, free, stable one that offers IMAP & SMTP. If you think folks that have them are Apple employees you REALLY neeed to get up to speed.
Second I'm WELL familier with IPP, also with PostScript, apparently you're not. PostScript is a pretty robust language (yes it's Turing Complete) and it's entirely possible to run applications written in it on a printer. Yes, you heard me; not just graphics but actual compute-and-do-something applications.
In this case I'm wondering if someone has done an IPP protocol stack in PS. Is it doable? Entirely. Most PS hosts (ie network printers) already have a TCP/IP stack, PS has no trouble tying into it and this it's clearly something that would be very popular.
Now, this may well ALL be news to you but folks raised properly generally have a bit more manners when publically flaunting their cluelessnes.
You may crawl back down that dank, apparently very deep and very dark AC hole you came from and not come back until you're willing to put a name to your own worthless words AND have picked up a bit of the information you so urgently push (and disparage) on others.
Over-&-Out
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
The point of my post was to point out that Apple does not have a heart of gold in doing what they do. They won't make these ports of Aqua and DPDF simply because they don't give a shit about this community beyond the point that it helps them. Not that this is unexpected, but it certaintly isn't something to hold up and glorify.
And I really don't know how you can accuse a community that gives away an entire operating system of greed. Apple got a hell of a lot from the open/free community including glib, gcc, perl, apache, and an entire UNIX subsytem that they emblazon rather large in their feature list.
No, they're not necessarily obligated to give anything back, and I applaud what they did with Darwin, but let's be frank about it. What they gave back with Darwin was no better than a Linux implementation, and in many ways it's worse. They didn't give any piece away that would have really helped anyone else. Remember, any changes and improvements that you make in Darwin get rolled back in to OSX to help it out. So you do wind up helping OSX users and yourself in the process, but Apple is certaintly not doing anyone any favors with this move. There's no charity involved, and they don't deserve heaps of praise.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
You know... I would kill for a port of Appleworks to Linux. I cut my teeth on Appleworks (nee Clarisworks), and didn't switch to Office until I got a PC many years down the line. And at that point I still wanted a copy of Appleworks. If they can't sell Appleworks on Windows, perhaps for Linux? One thing that I've never seen is a Works package for Linux, which is probably a function of the fact that everyone thinks of MS's stinking pile of shit works program when they think of Works. Appleworks is such an amazing program. Do you think this kind of port would constitute a danger to Apple from MS? It is a great program that deserves more attention.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
hawk
Now this is what I like - people without ethics and who don't have the balls to weigh in on their own. Mod a guy down, why don'tcha, for speaking his mind and staring the parent down for what it is: silly, immature and just plain sad...
Well, the CUPS FAQ and guidelines for submission are very clear that the copyright of contributions to the CUPS baseline must be assigned to ESP so we can license the code to others.
As for the "monetary exchange", there is not a single Linux distributor that has paid money to us, even for support, yet they (and all Linux users) get to use CUPS for free as a result.
Also, before you criticize us, you might want to look at our web sites - we provide most of our software under GNU licenses, and we regularly contribute to other open source projects like SAMBA, GIMP-print, FLTK, GNOME, etc.
I print, therefore I am.
Actually, most recent Linux distros are coming with CUPS; some make it the default, some offer it as a choice.
RH 8.0 is also coming with CUPS...
I print, therefore I am.