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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 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.
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.
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.