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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?
By using Mac OS X's interface to CUPS.
:P
"For those who are still frustrated with the CUPS GUI, how would you improve it?"
Close our eyes, and pretend the problem doesn't exist.
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 */
The article that is referenced is here:r or.html
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-hor
Mand[rake|riva] ships with a very easy-to-use printer admin tool. I know that they're kinda low on the geek cred scale, at least in the states, but their distros are a hell of a lot better for your Aunt Gertrude than FC or Deb will ever be.
In other words, the geek distros are still hard to use, but that doesn't mean all distros are.
forgoet the CUPS application tools, user http://localhost:631. The www interface at least works all the time.
SELECT L.driver
FROM linux_partition.linux_drivers L
INNER JOIN windows_partition.windows_drivers W
ON L.driver_id = W.driver_id;
Running FC3 on my laptop and was able to install a network printer and print to it from Firefox within minutes...I was impressed.
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.
If I remember correctly, the problem ESR was having was with the RedHat GUI. The only "CUPS GUI" is really the web interface on port 631. Every other "real" GUI is made by some other vendor/project e.g RedHat, KDE, Gnome, etc... (OpenOffice?). I have my own complaints about the CUPS web interface, but they're nothing major. I've always just tweaked the cupsd.conf file and added the printer (s)in the web interface. No major biggy there. This all just a storm in a teacup.
Does this mean that there should not be a free alternative to improving the situation? The base for Tiger is BSD right and that is free of GPL entaglements right?
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
It's still a great big steaming pile. I never thought it would happen, but from time-to-time I catch myself saying; "Maybe I should go back to lpd" <shudder>
One more rant, whoever it was that was unimaginative enough to come up with the foomatic name should be flogged.
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.
"OK, it was close to a year ago... that Eric Raymond's tirade on the unfriendly status of configuring the CUPS printing system on Linux was published.... 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."
Well, so much for ESR tirades motivating the development of user-friendly software. Anyone else have any ideas?
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
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
Open source programmers work on what is sexy. CUPS isn't sexy. You want someone to do that kind of work, you have to pay them, which is why oos will never have the same polish as commercial OSs (polish doesn't mean themes and icons guys).
Weird comment...you are criticizing the lack of posts 3 minutes after the original article was made available?
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
KDE's control panel offers a very nice UI for CUPS administration. It's not as simplistic as the Mac OS/X one, but nearly as easy to use (and, in some cases, much more convenient -- it's much more flexible).
Of course, round here, we've been distributing printer CUPS configuration via RPM (URPMI). Most user's don't even need to know there's a way to configure the printers -- they just magically appear.
Works like a charm in FC4 Test 2. I just plugged in a hp deskjet 3845, pressed print, and it worked. (not to mention Win* needs the HP print system programs to run this)
No "proffit!!" step?
Sorry, I will look for another solution, thank you.
errera hunamum ets
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.
Using the FC3 printer configuration tool, I checked the "share this printer" box. It asked me to give the printer a name, which I did.
I went downstairs to my GF's Powerbook running OSX 10.3.x and told it that I would like to add a network printer. It found the printer that I had created. I clicked "print a test page" and everything "just worked." I don't see how it could get much easier.
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.
One of the problems with FLOSS is that it tends to be written by hackers (which is also one of its biggest benefits, but I digress)...
Hackers want lots of options. They want to be able to configure FIFO settings for serial printers and flow controls, and all the technical nitty gritty.
Grandma doesn't know what the hell a flow control is. All she wants to do is a print a picture the grandkids sent her.
The biggest barrier to FLOSS usability is often overwhelming the user with too many options. A good GUI presents the most basic options you need to accomplish a task, and hides the rest where Grandma won't find it, but where someone who wants to change some deep, dark setting has the option of doing so.
IMHO, Mac OS X Gets It Right. Their configuration dialogs are quite simple, but you can always get under the hood if you need to. That sort of ease of use is what makes OS X a Unix that Grandma can use.
And if it takes messing about with obscure settings to get things to work, then the back end needs to be refined until the system works.
Complexity is at odds with usability, and in general FLOSS tends to be balanced more towards the former than the latter.
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.
For those who are still frustrated with the CUPS GUI, how would you improve it?
do some research. see how M$oft and Mac does theirs.
Do that.
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
check out http://hpinkjet.sf.net if you have a USB HP printer... but as far as getting a nice GUI for CUPS, not sure.
There are tools avaliable that makes setting printers up a breeze. None of the ones i use are proprerity so any dist can use them. While i admit that the cups GUI should be better laid out and more userfriendly i think many users dont really see this problem.
The thing that pops into my mind is the question:
Why doesnt those who feel this is a real problem fix it?
DIY?
HTTP/1.1 400
I recommend it as a way of setting up printers. The functionality is the same but it looks nicer and seems easier to use for those without cups experience. I don't know if there's a gnome equivalent.
I am trolling
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.
Same issues with CUPS on MacOSX: after having used it, and - when gotten it to work - prayed every time I had a print job, to actually see it through, on all my Linux boxes, I got myself an iBook (my first Mac ever - OSX 10.3.x), to find it installed there, also. Ever since day one, after tweaks of all sorts, I still have instances when only the first page prints, or cups just leaves behind all junk files in its log directory, etc. Oh, well - just my $0.02.
== With enough Will Power, one could move mountains. With enough Brains, one would just leave them where they are ==
If Fedora doesn't make it easy to set up a printer, then it's Fedora's fault. The whole purpose of a distribution is to sort things like this out.
It would be the same if there was a partition-eating bug in the Linux kernel. If Fedora destroys your data, it's Fedora's fault, even if the bug is in the Linux kernel.
In my case, I use KDE, and have had no problems setting up printers. If Fedora doesn't use KDE and doesn't supply suitable tools that do the same thing as KDE's printer manager, then it's a major shortcoming of Fedora. Not "Linux".
Ubuntu shipd w gnome-cups-manager which is really easy to use. The only problemn it is a little buggy still. I had trouble with it since my network printer name has a "/" in it.
nothing is real
My experience with setting up CUPS is the exact opposite. I agree that it has not improved over the past year, but it *IS* remarkably simple to set up a printer with CUPS. I got it on my second try, back a bit over a year ago, and have reconfigured cups maybe 10 times since then, without any trouble.
What's so hard about clicking on "Manage Printers" and then "Add Printer"?
Among my recent linux converts, they described CUPS as being relatively hastle free, and superior to the oft-broken process under Windows.
Well done sir. Good job.
I'll never understand why all those kiddie forums replace good, old-fashioned Hypertext with some lame-ass propietary [url=lameass] scheme. It only makes the forums harder to use.
Oh, and ditch the 2 inch deep graphical sigs while you're at it. They detract from the content if there is any content.
*bump*
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
I admit, I was stumped with the whole setting up the printer in CUPs. I had a friend who works in Linux daily set it up. We had to set up a few test printers, and then try to navigate to the IP address of it(on 2K for internet printing).
After all was said and done, any printout I made printed about 90% of the page, and then it was garbage city. And as a general rule with messed-up printings, all garbage that prints out a form feed every few lines or so. So it's not one page of garbage characters, it's a stack of them.
Eventually I just gave up, and will be just using a Win98 box with sharing for all print jobs.
I've always heard a lot of bad things about CUPS, but have only had occaision to use it over the past year or so. Maybe I've just been lucky, or CUPS is a whole lot easier to mess with on Gentoo, but I've never had any problems with it.
I hate to say it but this is one area windows has it all over Linux. On a windows machine I can setup a printer in under 10 seconds. On my Linux box I still have yet to make it work.
In windows setting up a printer is as easy as \\servername\ printersharename
On the server adding that printer to be available to clients is just a matter of knowing what port, or IP its on (which configures a "port" when you provide the IP during setup). This again is a minor job.
I've tried, several times to get CUPS working and ave found it the stupidest sub system in all of UNIX. There has got to be a better way, but I haven't found it yet, has anyone else?
I have been able to get everything I have ever needed working in Linux in the past simply bu reading the man pages and how-to's but neither seems to have the answers for CUPS.
My printer in my house is on a printer server box. Configuring printing should be trivial. Privide a printer type and an IP and GO.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
I am the only one to not to have problems setting up cups printers in linux.
I don't do anything exotic with the printers but on my desktop at work I am connected to three different hp laserjets through the jetdirect cards and have never had a problem - just had to get the ip address of the printer but that's it.
Where I work they have instructions all over the place on how to set up printers in windows and I have printed out some instructions how to do it in linux and mine are shorter we have mixture of windows and linux client pc's. I laugh when the windows users say the printer is down and I just keep printing to it.
Never looked into why but does anybody know if windows can print directly to the jetdirect card. last time I checked it couldn't but hopefully they changed that in XP.
I remember fooling around with old netware 3.11 and using it as a print server to print to hp printers - nowadays though it great that everything as tcp/ip and we have gotten rid of the old proprietary protocols - now we can just get rid of smb/nmb.
The trick is to tell it that it's a local printer and add a new "Standard TCP/IP" port.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Comparisons to Windows are beyond the point: the fact is, the CUPS interface undeniably sucks, that is the point of this article.
So there.
I'll admit I screen my hardware, but I've had very little trouble with CUPS using System-Admin->Printing in GNOME 2.10.1 (ubuntu.) I clicked "new printer," "forward" (aka "next'), and "apply." it detected it and selected the driver. I didn't have to do anything but make sure it was right.
I don't know anything about fedora. I also have had trouble in the past with using my own ppd files. But I think the interface was just fine.
As for general printing problems? There are plenty. Just because your printer works in OO.o doesn't mean it will work in GIMP, for instance. (same with copy/paste, btw.)
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
____
Printers are, generally, a bit of a pain in the ass. There are way too many proprietary drivers and driver styles, and I really don't see the need for it.
Why can't these manufacturers define a standardized, extensible interface format for their printers and end this madness once and for all?
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I don't understand the issue. The KDE printer control has always been a great CUPS admin tool. I've never had a problem with it.
...this story appears immediately I just spent an hour wrestling with CUPS and a bloody "Unsupported Personality: PCL" error.
For those that are interested, use this driver for the HP LaserJet 1012 if you don't want to have to power-cycle the printer every 5 or ten pages.
Still #1 -- Lonely Gay Geek
Umm... in my experience, setting up CUPS is trivial.
At my house, my brother set up the CUPS server. When I configured my laptop (with Gentoo Linux), I found that after I started the CUPS daemon, it already was configured.
The CUPS server broadcasts its configuration to the local network. The local CUPS daemon
I literally have not touched the local CUPS configuration ever since. I'm not sure how much trouble setting up the print server was, but in my experience, setting up a client is no problem.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 Whoops, silly middle mouse button...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
... that I also previewed this post 5 times and only noticed that I typed my user name instead of ironic in the title AFTER posting it. =)
Still #1 -- Lonely Gay Geek
And Eric is very good at pointless ranting
...
now, if he would implement a solution
not that i would care, dead tree format is clumsy
Exercise caution when modding this message up: the author acts like a jerk when his karma is excellent.
Windows network printing setup is about as simple as it gets. 1) Make sure you are logged on to your machine with a user account that has permissions to the print server machine. 2) Find the print server machine on the network by going to: \\printserver All printers will be listed. Pick the one you want. 3) Double click on the printer you want setup. Chill for 5 seconds as drivers are downloaded and the printer is setup for you. 4) Print! I have tried to print to a network print server in Linux, and damn, it is weird/complicated/stupid/frustrating. But if you hang in there, it DOES work.
Only in Ameri^H^H^H^H^HLinux...
Amen to that. I did lots of work for the Local School district here where I lived. I showed them that trick, and how it worked every time. They refused to do it that way, and I always had to fix their shit. Oh well, $10 an hour was well worth the ease of the job.
Game Overdrive - Gaming News
CUPS autodetects your printer, but then asks you how your printer is connected? (locally,cups,jetdirect etc.).
It *knows* i have no jetdirect or network printer, that the printer is connected on lp0 and it correctly detects the model.
Why it needs to ask me how the printer is connected is beyond me. This can only confuse new users.
VStrider.
What's wrong with gnome-cups-admin?
Also, enable "Browsing On" in your cupsd.conf, and you'll autofind all the cups printers on your network.
When I take my laptop to my apartment, my printer appears in print dialogs. When I take my laptop to my parents', theirs appears (and mine is gone). No muss, no fuss, no bother with any drivers.
What's more, all the windows machines in my apartment can use my cups share, too, since that just uses IPP, which most versions of windows already talk, or can be made to talk with a patch from MS.
MRSH-Recording device, corned beef sandwich with kraut, seafaring bird, and the foamy top of a beverage.
You ask an application to print something. At most, you should have to specify which printer. The system should have figured out by itself everything it needs to know about directly attached printers. Anything on the local network that offers printing should have already been recognized. Faraway printers may have to be specified in some way, but even there, you'd expect a directory system or search engine to do the heavy lifting. There should be no need for explicit "system administration".
That's how it should work. Yes, it's not easy to do it that way. Yes, there are some older printers that can't be automatically identified via their electrical interface. Yes, sometimes the system may have to find and download some format conversion program.
I've used the CUPS interface on RH9 and FreeBSD 5.3 without problem for an admittedly small variety of printers. While it's not the most intuitive, it wasn't difficult.
My Win2000 and WinXP boxes don't seem to have trouble connecting via SAMBA.
Though I used the CUPS interface to set up my *nix boxes, I have been using Webmin for certain other purposes. (Yeah, so I'm a weenie for not doing everything with conf files...) So, I checked the Webmin interface in /Hardware/Printer Administration and found it semi-clean. Except for needing to pre-install some print drivers manually, it looks like it should be relatively easy.
Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about.
Try setting up a IPP or LPD printer in Windows. Its nothing for grandma. Setting up a printer in a mixed Windows enviroment isnt a blast either. Windows 95/98/2k/XP doesnt play that nice togheter.
I think aiming for Windows is to low. Apple MacOS X should be where we want to go.
HTTP/1.1 400
Yes! This is actually a really useful hack; especially in conjunction with the generic postscript driver. Blammo! Instant postscript programs for any output that can be printed.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Good!, Let me put that in another words:
A Guide For GNU/Linux Users
1. Save up $500.
2. Forget about your freedom and Buy a Mac.
3. Live as a slave of a company that sells proprietary software and hardware.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Why don't you use KDE's KPrinter? It made ESR's complain moot at the time of its writing, and now even more so.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
I wouldn't call it easy. The last time I tried to figure out, I had to contact the IT department, who told me that a remote printer with an lpd queue has to be configured by choosing the local printer option. How is calling a remote printer a local printer intuitive or easy?
hm, yeah. My experience with trying to get my linux desktop to interface well with the Windows print server at work (which is domain authenticated) was pretty bad. Tried lots of different interfaces. I had it working once, but then it broke, and I could never figure it out again. This was with Debian, but I haven't had better luck under other distros.
Finally I started printing to postscript files and then using smbclient to "put" the file to the printer. I encapsulated this into a little script and voila! Printing works. However, it's now a two-step process. I figure I could probably figure out how to improve it, but I haven't bothered as it doesn't really matter. I only print things occasionally, so printing to a postscript file and right-clicking my script on the document takes an extra... two seconds, maybe less. No biggie. But I do wish it were integrated better...
opening a browser and typing http://localhost:631 to configure your CUPS printer?
"Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you?" --Yoda {whips out green light saber}
But it's not recommended to do this on all systems in which CUPS is used.
For example, on Fedora Core 3 GNU/Linux when one tries to manage printers by visiting http://localhost:631 with a web browser, one sees "Use system-config-printer to edit this!". For those who don't know, "system-config-printer" is a supplied printer configuration program which is probably most commonly accessed through the main menu (in GNOME, pick Applications->System Settings->Printing).
Digital Citizen
I have a Mandrake box, and we bought a powerbook and got the free Epson printer that came with it. After messing with plugging/unplugging the usb cable from the printer to the powerbook many times, I said "I'll try plugging it into the Linux box. I know it won't work, everybody told me printing from Linux is a nightmare and not to attempt it, but just in case we won't have to keep pulling that plug.".
Well I plugged it in, and tried printing a page from Konqueror, and it worked!
I then went to the Powerbook, and after some fiddling, found the pulldown, selected the second printer, and it worked again! Output was identical to the output from directly connecting to the powerbook (including certain glitches which do not seem to be in the output from the Linux machine, which makes me think the Linux driver may be better).
It seems Slashdot is as big a source of FUD as anybody, as I seriously did not even attempt to plug the printer in, I was so convinced it would not work!
That said there were two problems: first I cannot seem to convince the Mac to forget about the fact that the printer was once directly plugged in, and they are named almost the same so there are two almost identical items on the pulldown. I guess I should search around on the Linux machine for some program to change the printer's name.
Second, and a more serious Linux-style problem, is that the printer abrubtly stopped working after I turned off the use of KDE for my own window manager and then rebooted the machine. It was obvious that lpq and so on were running, but the printer would not print and say it was "not responding" and the machine was aware if it was turned on/off, so it seemed I was not completely dead. I ran various configuration gui's and finally found something I think was called "lock down the usb port mapping" that fixed it.
Increasingly I am seeing things wrong with Linux where it is obvious the "hard" work has already been done, for instace USB devices can plug in and programs to print the status of USB instantly show the new device, the fact that it is a disk, the exact model and manufacturer, etc, and if I su and type enough stupid commands I can actually see the contents of the disk. Surely getting it to talk to the disk and read/write files from it is a lot harder than doing something so that the disk is automatically mounted, right? So why is this not being done, or designated as "part of the desktop environment"? I certainly want that disk mounted even if I am not running X! This is the exact type of frustration with Linux that leads to people complaining about it.
Most of Eric's comments are NOT about CUPS, but instead about the various GUIs that have been written to run on top of CUPS.
Regarding the CUPS web interface, there is actually a LOT of development happening for the new CUPS 1.2 release to make things work much more smoothly, ask the user less questions when they don't need to be asked, and move the web interface to a more task-oriented UI instead of the current function-oriented UI.
For example, in the new web interface the "add printer" button will list any printers that CUPS discovers automatically ("Epson Stylus RX300 on USB port") - you just click on "add listed printers" to add the printers, or "add printer manually" to add one manually. Similarly, printer sharing, remote administration, etc. are now check boxes on the administration page instead of going through the cupsd.conf file.
Anyways, good changes ARE coming for the native CUPS interfaces, and I only hope that the Linux distributors follow suit with their GUIs...
I print, therefore I am.
Yes, it is easy in XP. In 2000 it can be done as well but in the wizard for config of a printer you need to take the wrong step (go into the directly connected printer part instead of the network printer, IIRC)
IIRC for windows 9x you need to download somthing from HP.
If a google on -> Windows 2000 jetdirect - does not give the answer, please let me know. I did it about a year ago on a clients machine.
Wayback datestamps the first version in February 2004
...because I've never thought of it as difficult. That said, I am a "computer guy" person and I can usually make sense of the things in front of me better than the non-"computer guy" people.
I use FC3 (started with FC1 and FC2) and I just go to add a printer, tell it where to find it (printer port, network printer, whatever... hell, even a samba shared printer) and tell it what kind of printer and done. The only tweaky things I run into once in a while is due the to quirk that I like to run in Japanese localized mode and it wants to select A4 type paper as default -- but that's my thing, not Aunt Tillie's.
And remembering back to almost any Windows printer installation I have ever done, you either run a setup program (put out by the printer maker) or go through the add printer wizard supplying information that isn't terribly dissimilar from the information I enter into the printer configuration thingy from Fedora Core.
Another reader commented that snazzy printer management stuff is generally supplied by the distro and not from the project itself.... so maybe that's the problem? He's not using the right distro and other distros aren't borrowing the 'best' stuff out there?
Whatever the case, my own exposure to the problem doesn't show me the problem.
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).
brought to you by the department of redundancy department
> For those who are still frustrated with the CUPS
> GUI, how would you improve it?
$ man lpadmin
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
Even the classes don't work as they could.. Round robin printing all the time day in and day out ! Yea ! How about stuff like priority lvls.. host checking.. autofailover.. It is definatly bare bones..
Then, if you could get a dime for each time someone complained about Windows, you'd have some more dimes... Then, if you could get a dime every time...
BenCurry.net
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.
MacOS X doesn't printer support significantly better than some GNU/Linux distributions do (like Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog or Fedora Core 3). Perhaps MacOS X gets things right (just plug it in, turn it on, let it autoconfig, print a document to test) with Zeroconf/Rendevous printers, but I don't know anyone who has one of those, so that didn't help me with my situations at all.
I wanted to hook up a Brother HL-1270N for the whole house to use and I wanted to hook it up directly to a computer. A friend of mine runs MacOS X and wanted to share the printer when he visited my house.
There was just as much technical nonsense going on with MacOS X as with the free software systems when I wanted to hook up a printer the whole house could share (a network printer). The printer was easy enough to set up -- the default settings were reasonable -- and it exposes itself via a number of protocols which CUPS understands.
The problem was none of the operating systems did the leg work to search the LAN for available printers and let me click on an icon representing the printer I wanted (or, if after searching all interfaces, there's only one printer available, simply make that the default printer). This would be a fine solution for most users most of the time, but instead users have to know the IP address of their printer and they have to know what protocol their remote printer should use. By the standards of "Just Works", this is not ready for ordinary users.
Even when hooking up a printer to the machine directly, MacOS X didn't fare as well as its free software competition. Only Fedora Core 3 GNU/Linux made it relatively easy to get the right thing done, thanks to kuzdu, the hardware configuration program.
I find printer support in MacOS X to be considerably overrated. With MacOS X, you're paying for software some of which is proprietary. If I'm going to give up my software freedom, I expect far better than what Apple ships.
Digital Citizen
I have a Brother Fax/Scanner/Printer Network device that supports windows, and Mac. I have gone as far as using the acutal ppd files(Had to hunt through OS X to find those) on my *nix boxen to get them to print to it. All the forums say it isn't supported in Linux, but couldn't you use the PPD from OS X as a basis and write a compatible driver for it?
Kosh: "Understanding is a 3 edged sword, your side, their side, the Truth."
People need to plug there printer into the machine, have the machine recognize, and install it.
Having to insert a cd would be ok.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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
I haven't set up a printer in Linux for years. and when I did it didn't support all the printer features. I am sure thats changed, and I see that it might have become as easy as windows,
But easier then windows? I bought a printer, plugged it in and it worked. Never took the driver out of the box.
How is it easier then that? did Linus come to your house and put in on your desk for you?
Coincidentaly, I installed a network printer at the office. My desktop Win 2k machine just picked it up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Give me drivers. I'll suffer through a some green on black curses interface ala make menuconfig for gawds sake. Error out with a message that says I was eaten by a grue if I don't respond with a [y] fast enough or in the wrong case. Just give me some drivers....
On impulse, I recently bought a Canon PIXMA i4000. I remembered reading some good reviews, it was on sale, and I had a $70 MIR (recently bought a Canon digital camera). I honestly was surprised to find that no decent drivers were available for this printer. I even wrote Canon to complain. The response was something along the lines "our seperate business departments choose what platforms to support and unfortunately, Linux was not one of them."
www.sguil.net
The Analyst Console for NSM
Providing an IP address, a printer share name, or any other such thing is not "easy". Non-administrative users don't want to learn what that means or why they need it (think Havoc Pennington's comment on what "PCM" means).
A far more reasonable interface for most users is what ESR described in his essay: let the machine search the LAN and any local interface, then prepare a pretty iconified list of printers, and allow the user to determine which printer is the one they want to print to (and which printer is the default for when they don't specify a printer).
This is simplicity for the user, the interface that really counts.
Digital Citizen
Hmmm seems to work just fine for me and I am running 450 of them
Got Code?
Hehe. Just open the cups TCP port! Amazingly, FC3 is too stupid to do that on its own... so it recognizes printers via UDP but cannot transfer data!!
printers have always been a pain because they don't have standard drivers.
Just ask RMS. He started GNU because he couldn't get his hands on the code for a printer driver.
99% of all cases consist of one printer, one printer cable and one computer. This case should be trivially dealt with first within any config s/w.
:-)
The next step is sharing a single already working printer with other computers.
Finally you deal with the complex situation where you have multiple printers on multiple servers that must be shared to multiple clients with restrictions.
I almost forgot, don't expect the users to understand your jargon or even know what kind of printer they have
Instead of bitching on /. about how you would improve it, maybe some of these frustrated people should actually get off their asses and get involved in the project.
It's really something. It's volunteer software, you babies aren't paying anything for.
"I've always just tweaked the cupsd.conf file and added the printer (s)in the web interface. No major biggy there. This all just a storm in a teacup."
Aunt Tillie is supposed to be able to do this, eh?
While I firmly believe that many of the complaints about a Linux system being unfriendly are bunk, sometimes they're not.
To put it in perspective, do you think sharing a printer from one Windows XP box to another would be a very easy task for her? No, probably not. She might not even know to use the word "sharing" in this context!
But, if you told her the basics "You have to 'share' the printer on the computer connected to it, and then add it on the other computer" she *might* be able to trudge through it and make it happen.
So although neither task is easy for Aunt Tillie, be it on Windows or Linux, the Linux end of things can be a challenge for even a technical person.
It's getting better all the time though, and I don't see why getting Linux 'on the desktop' has to be rushed like so many people want it to be. I think it will happen naturally as long as things stay on the right track.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I do have a problem with the Admin GUI included by default.
/cups-general because of our environment.
/printers.cgi takes around a minute and a half.
I've been pretty frequently posting to the cups-bugs
We basically have two cups servers with almost 1500 printers each now. That number will continue to grow. At that number of printers, printer replication fails between servers and loading
We've basically developed a series of scripts for managing the printers via a mysql database and some command line tools that export to csv and builds shell scripts with the lpadmin command. This at least allows us to update both servers with the same information. These CUPS servers are
Mind you we've not had a problem with the print jobs themselves...just managing the printers.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Unfortunately, living in the computer ghetto with Linux, the printer manufacturers don't write drivers for us. We have to figure it out for ourselves.
... (favorite non-MS OS goes here)), it's *going* to be hard to get a printer to work perfectly, with all the functionality.
With MS-Windows, it just works because the printer manufacturers write the drivers for MS-Windows. That's why, with every printer I install, I end up installing another 20M of software, just to support printing.
Yeah, it's a pain in the ass to set up CUPS. It'd be nice if we could just bum the MS-Windows drivers that come with the printer, but that ain't gonna happen, because each printer comes with its own damned installer, too.
Printers "just work" in MS-Windows because the printer manufacturers made sure it "just works." Since they don't care about Linux (or *BSD, or Solaris, or
The problem is, CUPS is still just a pain in the ass to set up where it *shouldn't* be. We have enough problems setting up the drivers to work well; why isn't there something to remove the basic administrative pain?
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Software proprietors do this too. MacOS X's printer interface doesn't autoconfigure as much as it should and it doesn't keep up with network changes. When a laptop user goes from home to work their default printer (and printer selection) should automatically change.
Instead, Apple develops so-called "sexy" programs in other areas--there is no free software video editor that can do what iMovie does (although some are in development and I wouldn't be surprised if one became competitive someday).
If Apple follows the path NeXT did, Apple will focus its development on things that run atop an aging and increasingly out of date OS. NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP (which, contrary to the name, was not "open source") were both built to feature the web development kit and various other "sexy" programs that ran on the BSD-based OS that received no significant attention. There were no improvements to the lower level parts of these OSes that can compare to the developments of the Linux kernel or the various GNU programs on which so many operating systems depend.
Digital Citizen
Wow, I didn't know they had running water in the Ozarks, let alone computers!
Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.
(adapted from Gandhi)
the kde print manager using cups is easy to navigate and use. Ive setup hundreds of printers using it over the last year to 18months.
I'm sure techies won't mind administrating C and D CUPS.
When will Open Source developers catch the same clue?
Tech Public Policy stuff
I really agree that this is one of the remaining things that must be fixed for linux to make further inroads on the desktop. [/P] I have just spent about 4 days trying to get my debian machine to print to my other debian machine, which acts as a print server, attached to a well-known HPLaserjet printer. [/P] How can anyone make any sense out of the following: Printing from Firefox, via Xprint, to CUPS, via SAMBA to the print server, which uses the foomatic-hpijs driver? And what are gimp-print and cupsomatic, anyway? [/P] Xprint is the most user-unfriendly, inscrutable, and hard to configure software I've ever seen in Linux. (Been here since Caldera OpenLinux 2.4) If you read the Xprint website, it does everything, apparently including world peace. Tried Xpp, did not work. [/P] What is amazing is that my OS X Powerbook prints to the Linux print server perfectly, and setup was no big deal. I can't get my debian machine to do the same.[/P] I have read all the Howtos, googled and still have wasted several days and still can't print. I fear there is no hope for Linux ever "making it big."
Yes, I'm serious. It's no harder than Windows in the most common situation where the printer in question is supported and attached locally, but a whole lot easier than Windows when the printer is somewhere else on the network. With autodiscovery, there's a pretty good chance you don't even have to do anything beyond selecting which printer you want to use among the ones currently available when the print dialog was opened. It doesn't get much easier than that.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I found CUPS configuration (for an HP 920c) to be a breeze, far easier than under Windows. Unforunately, under Windows, the "make prints look like ass" is disabled, but under Linux it's set by default, and I can't find anywhere to turn it off.
"Fight for lost causes. You may discover they weren't."
I set up a button to start http://localhost:631 in the w3m browser in an xterminal. w3m supports the images and I don't have to wait for firefox or some other big browser to start in order to configure a printer through the web interface.
The web face is aceptable. Neither perfect nor unusable.
/etc/cups/ppd/ .
But I spent a half hour today trying to get it to let me access it from another computer with no joy.
So I gave up and ran redhat-config-printer-gui since it's trivial to make it display on a remote X11 server. And, lo and behold, it was simple enough. I have a couple of nitpicks, but that's all. Use the wizard to add printers, then use the edit feature to tweak the details. All I missed was a way to assign multiple names to one printer, a la BSD's lp daemon.
If the ppd you need isn't in this release, select the closest thing you can find, go grab the right one off the cups site or vendor site, and replace the printer's ppd file in
the real problem is the admin schema wasn't built for use with a GUI. Real Men just and tap away at the terminal. In the case of MacOS-X which I use, and a lot of posters here have claimed is so easy, the root account is not enabled by default. Much CUPS admin requires su privileges. The web interface at 127.0.0.1:631 seems to operate with current user privileges. It is necessary to sudo edit cupsd.conf to comment out 2 lines to enable any user at the local keyboard to add/modify their own printers.
Cups comes with a good list of printer drivers, but to connect to the various printers I have used in the past 3 years I have needed also: foomatic, hpijs, and ppds downloaded from the maker's site. Once you've located the driver/ppd you then need to know the correct syntax to manually enter the address of your printer, depending on how it connects, IP-lpr, USB, appletalk, etc.
Sure, this is mostly pretty well covered in the on-line help. There's a total of 13 docs installed on my machine in both
But the underlying engine is Open Source *nix, it's visible thru the GUI, and somebody else said above, it's not Aunt Tillie's cup of tea.
Perhaps beating on the GUI is the problem, not CUPS.
You might visit the horses mouth:
http://www.cups.org/
where, IMO, things were reasonably clear into my third pass. My excuse, old, slow, and deep in the groove.
Also see the SAMBA CUPS HOWTO.
Making it mandatory.
/etc/cups/cupsd.conf, but the most important parts (the parts beneath the DO NOT EDIT line) are removed with every GUI interaction or package update.
The ability to configure a daemon via the command-line (ie scriptable) is an absolute must for any GNU/Linux system.
CUPS really dropped the ball when they made the decision to make their system only configurable via a GUI. Sure we have
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Everyone is screaming "just use Yast", "use the webinterface" or "system-config-printer isn't that bad". That's not the point. Here's the scenario:
The user plugs in a printer. There is no step two. If there was no printer before, the printer is now the default. There is no need to tell the machine about it this, no GUI popping up, no config programs to run. If there was a previous default printer the user can right-click its icon representation in some control center to make it the default, otherwise it is just a choice in the print preview dialog.
Stop bitching that CUPS is good enough. Informing us that tool X does what you want it to do is of no worth whatsoever. That is simply taking the easy road. Open Source can, and will given enough time, do better. By failing to see the problems you are just hurting Open Source by your zealotry.
Whether some other operating system does it in some other way is completely irrelevant. The nature of Open Source is to iteratively approach a perfect state. There is no part too small or insignificant, or grand and important, that we can not improve it. Every single wording of every label is open to refinement, every padding issue of every widget open to tweaking to perfection. And when the system plain sucks we rip it out and do it again. The only constant factor in Open Source is change and improvement, 365 days a year 24 hours a day. The shop never closes, on Christmas day there is a million CVS checkins around the globe. That is what Open Source is all about. I put very real code where my mouth is, if your contribution to Open Source consists of "well, it works for me", SHUT THE FUCK UP, in your shortsightedness you hurt Open Source and I as a developer will rather have 5 guys pointing out flaws than you promoting the status quo.
It's like deja vu all over again.
No, actually, he doesn't. He doesn't talk about Windows at all in fact! He talks about open source always going for the better. So why'o'why shouldn't we have a better implementation and printingsystem than Windows?
Do you mean we should wait until Windows gets this (or any other) feature and then implement it by copying the exact same behaviour? -- Well, you can do that - but I actually think it's a good thing getting cups better than any other printingsystem! And also doing that first.
With opinions like that floating around, no wonder people say that FOSS is only copying properitary software.
A Guide for Mac Users
Then your Aunte shouldn't use a computer, or should only operate, and have a sysadmin to administrate it. A computer is NOT a toy, and the companys that try to turn it into one just so they can also profit from the iliterate masses are just giving knifes to monkeys.
I think that about covers it.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
I'd bet most girls would agree. I know one I can ask if no one else does.
:P
Sure you could do that, but what does asking your mother accomplish?
Join the TWIT army now!
Setting: At the moment, I'm at my place in Texas, running Fedora Core 3; I have KDE on this machine but have been mostly groovy with Gnome, as the Good Lords at Red Hat intended :) I don't have a printer handy, so I don't know how easy or reliable Gnome's printer setup tools are. However ...
With KDE, which I've used on various systems running Knoppix and Mepis, I agree with you, and found one thing especially nice: if there are several machines on a network, and I set up printing by attaching my USB laser printer to one of them and running the KDE printer-setup program, the other machines then see it automatically, no work necessary on my side. Since I would probably have gone crazy if I had been *trying* to get this to work, it's a cool bonus.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I just read a post from a guy who said he has been a Unix admin for 20 years, and it took him a week to get this setup. You've been an admin for 20 years and you couldn't figure out cups?!?!?! Is cups perfect? No. Do I think it could be improved? Of course. Is there anything out there better? Not a chance.
I've seen people struggle for days and days getting a printer to work on Windows. Cups, no problem. This may sound elitist of me, but if you can't figure out cups as installed by some distro, then you have issues. When ESR went off on that rant he lost major points with many people, myself included.
Now that I've said that, I would improve certain things on the dialogs that are used to install printers in cups. This is for kprint, so it might not apply to others.
That's pretty much it. Otherwise, CUPS is nearly as good as it can get.
I was raised on the command line, bitch
"Nemo me impune lacesset"
I can report mandrake 10.1 is pretty much the same, auto detected and I could use the printer HP1100 pretty much straight away. Thought the output print capability (ability to control printer - say 6 pages compressed into 1) was way inferior.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
CUPS was developed by Easy software products. They have GPLed it, but they also sell support. (Apple licensed CUPS from them, though I don't know what terms were used)
Nobody wants to contribute software for free that they will then turn around and make a product out of. So you would have to fork the project, and that means you can't easily stay in sink with whatever updates they do make.
My question is why doesn't Eric embrace the open source ethos and take the source to CUPS and change it. Then he could submit a patch with his changes.
Oh wait, he'd rather whine for other people to give away their time for free. If he has a problem with an open source project and the developers are not addressing his concern, then he should take advantage of the fact that its open code.
For him, he might as well use a proprietary package. At least a vendor who gets paid might address his concerns.
I personally see no difference between code that is closed source or code that is open source that you never read/edit. Whether its lack of skill, talent or modivation. If you don't exercise your right to modify open source code, whats the point of having that right? Maybe someone will take that right away and you'll never know that its gone.
Maybe if Eric spent his time making CUPS better instead of crying about its current state, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
Ubuntu Linux has a very nice Printer configuration dialog. Pull down System/Administration/Printing to check it out.
/etc/cups/cupsd.conf for the (terse) explanation. I hope that future versions will have somewhat more fine-grained control than this.
The toughest part of CUPS is setting up a remote printer. As other posters have complained, you need to type in a special URL and get it just right; an example would really help. But Ubuntu actually makes this easy too: open the Printer configuration dialog, and from the Global Settings menu choose "Detect LAN printers". Once you have done this, it will detect all the CUPS printers being shared out on the network and automatically add them for you!
It seems that if you check the "Detect LAN printers" checkbox, Ubuntu will start sharing out any printers on your computer. (I'm using Ubuntu 5.04; I'm not sure if 4.10 works this way or not.) See the comments in
Before you can change the "Detect LAN printers" checkbox you will need to have the appropriate privileges. You will already have them if you are a member of the "lpadmin" group; otherwise, you must use the "Become Administrator" menu item from the Edit menu, and type in your password (just as with other sysadmin tools). To join the lpadmin group you can go to the System/Administration/Users and Groups dialog, click on your user name, click on "Properties", choose the "User Privileges" tab and check the "Setup Printers" checkbox.
This still isn't perfect. To share just one printer you would need to shut down CUPS and edit the config files by hand. Ubuntu picks a name for each printer you create using the Printers dialog, and to change this name you will need to edit config files by hand. If you "Detect LAN printers" you detect them all (all on the same subnet with your computer), and again I'd like somewhat more fine-grained control than that.
It may not be perfect but it's a huge improvement. If ESR had been using this, he never would have written that rant.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
From what I recall was "How do I setup CUPS on a new PC to print to a CUPS queue that's already setup on another PC?"
Yes, the tools to setup a printer connected directly to your Linux
box make it pretty damned simple. But there was no visible way to print to a remote queue.
Now, the answer is, that CUPS can broadcast the queues it has, and any other CUPS server on the network can pick up those broadcasted print queues.
HOWEVER, at the time, the only way to get CUPS to broadcast it's print queues was to go into the config file, and turn on this barely documented feature. And then you had to tell the other servers to listen, using the same method, edit the config file.
The web interface had no facility to turn this sharing on. Recent versions of MacOS X do have an option to share printers or to look for shared printers, so obviously they've taken advantage of this functionality, it wasn't there initially.
The previous comments are only true, if no-one says they're wrong.
The filter programs are part of CUPS. To see this graphically, see this Wikipedia diagram.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
No other printer manufacturer uses the brain-dead installation method that Epson uses. If you don't follow their ridiculously confusing installation foldout (foldout!) and turn on the printer first, you're stuffed. To get around it, you need to run the uninstallation program, then turn off the printer and run a program called epusbun.exe, restart the computer, run the install procedure and turn on the printer when the installation program asks you to.
Bloody Epson drivers.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
And the whole thing would be a hell of a lot easier if true PostScript printers were cheaper and more available. Why aren't more printers PostScript compatable at a basic level? Is it an Adobe licensing issue?
"One year later CUPS still SUCKS"
I've set a few 3rd person computers meant for email and web browsing (one uses Open Office's Word processing heavily too).
Installing a printer was a simple matter. Went into HW section, Add printer, is it local or on the net?...net. Do I want it to scan or do I know the name/ip?... Gave it IP and it goes off and scans for the printer... Then "you have successfully installed your printer" I was told.
Think I had to type in the Admin(root) password at some point, as it currently takes root access to modify system files....but it really wasn't a bit pain.
It may not be as intuitive as Windows, but the Windows interface for printer control has been around for several years, However, it was a GUi I could talk a new user through w/o me telling them each character to type.
No big deal. I'm heard that SuSE has open-sourced YaST, maybe the fedora folks will grab -- or maybe they'll reject it on the NIH** principle.
L
**-Not Invented Here
As of three months ago the problems Eric described have not been fixed. Two points: First, Eric isn't trying to just set up a printer. He's trying to share a printer using the cups broadcast/autodetect feature; Second, Eric is really aiming this rant at people designing the user interface on OSS. The particular mistakes here are that the cups designers: did not extend the GUI to allow the sharing of printers; and they really buried the options which control this extremely valuable feature.
Even after having said this I'm sure that most people don't get what all the fuss is about since they can probably go through the web gui to manually add a printer in cups. That part is pretty well designed but a cups "server" can also be configured to send out a broadcast packet periodically which tells anyone who is listening on the lan what printers are available. So, on one of my networks when you visit with your laptop you don't setup printers. It's automatically done 30 seconds after you connect to the network.
-- Ecks
The UI as is planed today is more for a CUPS developer or a devoted user more than for a joe sixpack.
What can be done, and would be pretty is to leave the desktop enviroment to take over cups. Why? Better integration into they envirovement. Maybe an standar-protocol way of comunicate whit it, like XMLRPC, SOAP or Corba would make possible to a Gnome or KDE to leave CUPS configured.
Also will bring the posibility to third party developers to make they own apps.
That would be nice.
>Linux is not user-friendly.
It _is_ user-friendly. It is not ignorant-friendly and idiot-friendly.