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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?
Or Mandriva as it's called now. Their printer admin GUI is peaches. :-) Maybe since it's GPL'd the CUPS team can just grab it from the latest cooker?
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Windows seems to have no problems with detecting a printer... I feel like there has to be a documented call/answer that would make the model/revision known to Windows. Could CUPS be altered to do the same thing in its installer? Could it have an online driver repository for the printer?
;)
Makes me wish I had time to actually work on these things, even if I find out that this can't be done.
It has little to do with CUPS itself. It is rather Fedora's system-config-printer-gui fault. Go check out other distributions - namely SuSE or Mandriva (former Mandrake) - each of them handles this by their own tool - YaST (SuSE) and Mandriva Control Center... Go, see how it looks and think again not to generalize stupid stuff like:
Fedora's printer config dialog sucks -> Linux printing status: unfriendly.
what bugs me is I configure cups, try to print out of an app which has its own printer settings (like Moz or Acrobat), then everything gets filtered through kprint, at least on my system. So if something doesn't work, where's the problem? Also, if I use the cups admin, it breaks the fedora system config utility's settings, and vice versa. Fate and Linux are playing tricks on me!
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
Indeed, of all the interfaces to CUPS that I have seen, two stand head and shoulders above the rest. Yast is hands down the best Linux interface. The other interface worthy of note is for an Apple variety.
If OS X uses CUPS, can I safely assume that every OS X-compatible printer is supported by CUPS? If so, why doesn't someone just clone that interface? I mostly use my Ubuntu box for a game server these days. I haven't been using Linux as a desktop for a while (for the most part, beyond testing new games), so maybe KDE or GNOME have their own shiny interfaces that could be given a facelift to function more like the OS X version?
put the what in the where?
I have a printer with jetDirect type of server interface. I have been a Un*x sysadmin for over 20 years, and it still took a week to get this working
Its simple things that floor you - How the hell are you supposed to know that the url for a jetDirect printer is
An example would fix this! A lot of the problems could be solved by better use of typefaces in the explanations, and less dumbing down. If you mean fully qualified domain name, then say so. If you mean port, then say so. If you can/must use an IP address instead, say so!Remember if your idiot cousin from the cake shop wants the printer to work, she will phone rent-a-nerd. If you are lucky, she will wear a low cut blouse and very short skirt for the occasion. She will not type urls into dialogue boxes, even if you use words of one syllable to describe it. She won't even think of plugging a USB printer into a Windows box by herself. The idea would not occur to her. And if it did, you both know she would phone you to come and get the USB plug out of the RJ11 socket shortly after.
And don't tell me about OSX - it took my son two months to get it working on his ibook. It could find the cups entry on my computer, but that did not work. It could not even find the printer directly. The one day, it started working by itself.
And don't even mention printing under windows as an example of what is "good" - it gives me pains in all the diodes in my left leg...
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I got my Windows XP Home laptop to print through my Mandrake 10.0 box to a 12-year-old printer, and I've only been using Linux effectively for about six months. I can't say I'm much inclined to help someone having trouble getting two Linux boxes talking to each other. Google is your friend (it helped me).
Being a bit of a Linux newbie as it comes to anything past a router, firewall or Samba, I can see that there are a few problems with CUPS but nothing show-stopping.
So long as you know about www.linuxprinting.org, you're set. The procedure via gui consists of: Connect with a web browser, add a new printer, give it a name, select a port (which admittedly can have some confusing options as many "ports" are available for a single, physical port), select a printer.
For bog-standard printers like HP Laserjet, you just select anything that looks HP-like until you can get to select your printer. For others (for example, my Samsung ML-4500 or inkjets etc.), download a PPD, install it in the right place beforehand and options will arise for that printer.
No, it's not 100% clear or simple but then not much in Linux ever is, but I have to say that CUPS is one of the easiest parts of my Linux setup. X, KDE and ALSA have given me ten times more problems. And once CUPS is up, so much uses it and detects it that you really have very few problems, KDE, Samba, etc.
Compared to the APSFilter (with all it's Ghostscript support) that I used to use for printer-servers prior to discovering CUPS it's a dream. I'd have to say that CUPS needs one or two minor tweaks to it's GUI, not much worse than that and even one or two lines of explanatory text or a web-link to Linux Printing's HOWTO would let it be used by even the simplest of Linux users.
Each time I make an attempt to tackle CUPS, I find that the easiest way to deal with configuring it is to delete that package and load LPRng. At least it's something that you can get working in a reasonable amount of time.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
you're talking about one of the most common and standard printers in printing history. Try that with a lexmark whosafudge 230794 and you'll find that making CUPS talk to your printer can be a huge bitch. Speaking of bitches, why is the standard way to do printer alignment still to use that stupid foomatic align.ps? There should be a wizard on the web admin to do alignment. I used the PPD for a digital LN17ps with CUPS and, though it has an lpr interface, I couldn't print straight from cups. I have to print to a windows machine using samba, which in turn prints to the printer using LPR! Now that I have it working, the alignment is wrong - it's ignoring the page margins, though they are in the PDF. It was actually easier to set up cups-pdf to generate PDF .
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You were doing something wrong on the Windows machine. In XP, it's trivial to set up, using SMB or IPP.
Windows 2000, on the other hand, is a little screwy. You have to set up a printer group, then print to the group. Man, it took me days to figure that out.
I can make my contribution to this having just configured a printer using Debian Testing and connecting to a remote printer shared on a windows XP machine. First of course you must have samba installed (not server, just client stuff and common.) Next if you run KDE you can use the KDE-printer setup which is wonderful in every respect except this one. After using KDE-printer, you must hand edit the URI in the printers.conf found in /etc/cups/ For example: DeviceURI smb://WORKGROUPNAME/account@computername/printerna me
Neither the nifty web interface (http://localhost:631 on my machine) nor the KDE-printer utility do this correctly. Its a bug. It may be specific to Debian as it also pops up its ugly head using Knoppix which uses the KDE-printer utility. I lost the url to the thread which dicusses this but, if you google the error message, I believe it will be found.
After this the printer worked fine. Two other small and to some obvious points . You must be root to do the above and you have to have the printer ppd file for yor particular printer. They are plentiful these days.
Any strange spaces in above due to slashcode
Try novell's iPrint for size, its not only pretty but has many useful functions.e 6/iprint.swf
http://www.novell.com/products/netwar
autmatic installation of drivers for windows Liux and MAC, IPP based web enabled instalation, lots billing, pooling and configuration options. It rocks
the link is a little dated and trying just a little to hard to sell it tho.
Paul F