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One Year Later - CUPS Admin Still Lacking?
DopeyDad asks: "OK, it was close to a year ago (Eric's site says July 2004, but I'd swear the original rant came earlier last year) that Eric Raymond's tirade on the unfriendly status of configuring the CUPS printing system on Linux was published. Well, I've been struggling with setting up a new laptop and getting it to talk to my print server, using Fedora Core 3, and nothing seems to have changed -- the admin items for adding a printer are exactly as Eric described them back then -- unclear, confusing, and no where near as friendly as their Win* equivalents. Definitely not something I'd expect my Aunt Ethel to be able to figure out. What's going on here? Granted, FC3 is ready to be replaced, but I don't see any CUPS updates for it. Is work being done with CUPS to address Eric's original complaints, or has this issue fallen off the radar?" For those who are still frustrated with the CUPS GUI, how would you improve it?
The article that is referenced is here:r or.html
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-hor
forgoet the CUPS application tools, user http://localhost:631. The www interface at least works all the time.
The built-in admin web-interface to set up cups is really just there so that an admin with no desktop can configure their print server.
If you are an end-user, it is implied that you should be using desktop tools to accomplish this.
Both Gnome and KDE offer very nifty printer configuration apps that will take care of setting up CUPS for you. Gnome uses gnome-cups-manager (run that from your terminal or create a launcher), while KDE uses kprinter (you can also run it from the terminal and create a shortcut).
It is also worth mentioning that when you hit print on Mozilla Firefox, you can hit "Properties" for the printer in the print dialog and change the "Print Command" line to KPrinter to let it handle the printing in a much less convoluted way.
Like everything else in Ubuntu, I had no problem configuring printers in CUPS. This is mainly because the web interface tells you to use gnome-cups-manager, and even tells you where it is in the system's menu structure. Really user friendly.
Not long ago, there was a Slashdot review of a certain book, which included a chapter on CUPS that can be downloaded for free (can't beat that price!). It seems to demystify the entire process of administering CUPS.
Five cents, please...(that's about all my opinion is worth these days)
All the world's an analog stage, and digital circuits play only bit parts.
Yea Suse worked for me AFTER I tracked down a PPD file for my printer. The problem is it still takes too much fiddling around to make it work. I had to find the windows PPD, on the Xerox website, which was in a windows self extracting zip.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
No, not every OS X Compatible printer is supported by CUPS.
I can print to by S330 just fine from OS X. I cannot on the other hand print to it over my network. CUPS doesn't support it. (might now, haven't checked recently).
And for some reason Windows won't print to it on my Mac, so I've been swapping the USB cable back and forth. Kinda stupid.
Mandr{ake,iva}'s printer admin thingie actually runs nmap to sniff your network and find all printers exported by all machines using any protocols it knows how to talk. It's pretty amazing, but it took 10 minutes or more to run on the building network here, during which time the GUI didn't repaint and appeared hung.
I would have killed it in disgust, thinking it really was hung, but first I did a "top" to see if I could tell what it was doing. Then my jaw dropped when I saw it running nmap and starting and stopping many other processes to try to connect to the open ports it was finding, so I let it finish and was fairly impressed. It really needs a progress bar, or better, to have printers pop up in the GUI as they are found.
Whilst I agree that setting up a CUPS server is still a pain - mostly because of the lack of decent documentation - once your server is up and running then workstation is even easier than the process described for Windows in the parent article.
All you have to do is - nothing at all! I can take a virgin PC, connect it to my network, boot with a Knoppix CD, start OpenOffice.org and all my printers are there and ready to use. No configuration, no drivers, no \\servername\printername. As soon as I do File=>Print in OpenOffice.org I get a list of the printers which are configured and ready for me to use. No user intervention of any sort required.
Yes, penetrating the fog of CUPS documentation to get your server(s) set up is a prime pain, but once the server is there then CUPS has Windows printing beaten hollow for ease of end-user use.
John
Did you try Gimp Print, it works for most USB printers. It works for my Lexamrk laser printer but not my HP inkjet, so YMMV... http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/
The reason some printers work on OS X and not on Linux is because CUPS allows running binary print filters. Remember, CUPS has nothing to do with preparing a data stream for printing. It is merely a queue manager. All it does to prepare a data stream is to hand it off to the filter program.
Many printer manufacturers use Carbon filters for OS X. Game over.
Now about ESR's comments, I never really saw what was so hard about it. Not that I'm claiming to be incredibly smarter than him, but the hardest part of setting up a printer using CUPS under Debian was knowing that I had to point my browser at http://localhost:631/. After that, what's so hard about clicking on Printers, Add Printer, then select the make and model? Seems pretty easy to me.
Maybe ESR wasn't using the CUPS web interface, but instead using some GNOME/KDE front end. Well then that's the problem because GNOME & KDE both suck anyway. For that matter, the OS X GUI front end to CUPS isn't all that great either. Really, the only great thing about CUPS on OS X is that when you plug in your printer, it just works and doesn't need to be configured.
If you dig through the CUPS documentation you learn that the 1150 is a PCL 6 printer so if you select "LaserJet 6" in the print setup tool you can print to the 1150. But Apple can't really expect Grandma (or even my non-geek lawyer friend) to figure that out.
(I may be misremembering it being PCL 6 and LaserJet 6, it might have been 5.)
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
K D E
You want a pretty little shell, install the thing.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This is completely incorrect. CUPS is a full featured RIP and postscript processor. It does support arbitrary binary printing, however, and this is exactly what happens when you print to cups from windows via samba. Please see the cups documentation.
If cups is just a "dumb spooler", explain lease how the heck it can print pdf, jpeg, hp-gl, tiff, and hundreds of other formats directly to your postscript printer?
If you don't have a postscript printer, yes, you must use a ppd that calls a intermediary driver (e.g., hpijs) that cups just passes the job to.