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CUPS - Common Unix Printing System
Background Information CUPS is developed and maintained by Easy Software Products, which is co-owned by the author of the book, Mike Sweet.
The complete table of contents for CUPS - Common Unix Printing System, aka "The Octopus Book" can be found here. The CUPS web site also contains errata lists and example code. In addition, Easy Software Products sells a companion CD for the book, only available on their web site.
Who should read it? If you do not use a printer with Unix or Linux, or if you do and you are perfectly happy with the results (maybe because the distro came with all the right stuff pre-installed), this book is not for you.
However, if you are serious about printing, if you are considering replacing the outdated legacy printing system that came with your Unix or Linux or if you are a developer even remotely interested in Linux/Unix printing, this book is for you.
Did I mention that the Octopus Book is also very helpful when it comes to understanding IPP, the Internet Printing Protocol? If you tried to read through all the RFCs on IPP out there and managed to understand IPP afterwards -- congratulations! I tried that, failed, bought the Octopus Book and finally understood.
How will it help users and admins? This book will show you how to install, administer and use CUPS. While the documentation that comes with CUPS is very good already, having everything in one handy package has its advantages, especially as the book goes into more detail than the on-line documentation. In addition, this book will explain to you in great detail how to extend CUPS. If you've ever wanted to be able to directly print some rather unusual file type -- or need a mechanism to create PDF files and email a copy of each PDF whenever you print them to a certain printer, this book will tell you how to do that.Anything for developers? Sure. Complete API documentation with loads of example code. Everything from "How can I add good printing support to my application" to "How do I write a printer driver?" is in there. Likes and dislikes Of course, no book is perfect. This book comes close, but you should know that a lot of it is already available for free on the CUPS web site. It also lacks details on how to rip the old printing system out of your legacy Unix -- but if you've got root, this is something you should know anyhow.
Another thing - it is not as funny as Terry Pratchett. But I can live with that.
As you might have noticed, I really like this book. It definitely made my work much easier -- I work for a manufacturer of (among other things) large printers and this (by now well-worn) book has been granted dedicated space on a very crowded desktop.
You can purchase CUPS - Common Unix Printing System from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
After the story a few days ago about how it was so flexible and could be used for queueing up MP3s etc?
Now there's a book I'd buy. The problem I have is seeing all this great stuff from a bird's eye view: How would someone know how all this stuff connects and interoperates? Or even, how would one know that they DO interoperate?
Is there a book that talks about this kind of top-down view? How to Administer a Small Business Using Nothing But OSS and Your Brain.
Maybe even a "cookbook" series:
- Implementing CUPS for Sweet Printing Stuff.
- Using OpenLDAP: Why the hell you should.
etc...
Anyway, just a thought.
Oops, a bit premature with the 'submit' button there.i es/k_g_ case.html
I meant to add that Samba + CUPS + OpenLDAP will do pretty much everything most businesses need for a back-end serving their MS desktops. It will also pave the way for bringing in new platforms (whether they be Open Source, MacOS X, whatever).
We've got a full case study illustrating this trilogy here:
http://www.siriusit.co.uk/support/casestud
CUPS will give equal quality/ease of use/simple admin printing to your *NIX and MacOS users as your Windows users. Couple this with an OpenLDAP authentication backend and you're in a great position to diminish your companies reliance on MS software, or even eliminate it on the back-end entirely.
Don't want to go on too much more, but the features coming up in Samba 3.0 (due rsn), especially enhanced LDAP support and MS AS interoperability make this trilogy a no-brainer!
There is a lot more to printing than writing device drivers. I've been using CUPS on MacOS X for quite a while, since there are no other drivers for my old Epson 1520. I'm a bit dissatisfied with the color management abilities of CUPS. Sure it has custom color tables, but no real way to integrate with Colorsync or other color profiling systems. I can turn off all color management in CUPS, hoping it prints a relatively neutral profile, and then let Colorsync work it's profile to that, but you don't really get the full dynamic range compared to real official Epson drivers with real official Colorsync. So I'm not even getting as good quality color output and matching as with MacOS 9. Oh well, I suppose I'll have to get a new printer with proper drivers one of these days, but I like my old 4color printer for press proofing, I can't stand 6 or 7 color printer proofs when I'm targeting CMYK film output.
What is missing with regards to printing in unix is something better that the standard (unfortunately), ultra primitive printer options dialog box given to the user, i.e. a prompt asking for your favourite lpr command.
When I select File->Print in an application in X I should be presented with a dialog box with access to all the selected printer's specific options (for instance print on both sides, etc). As long as this is not the case printing in unix sucks, although with CUPS it sucks less :)
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").