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?

Comments

Answer

[daveschroeder]

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

Re:Answer

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

Heh. Does this look like a prettier version of MS's printer admin stuff to anyone else?

The thing that's missing is seamless functionality and implementation, as usual. Coding cool stuff and coding pretty, highly portable stuff are two different things, and it's hard to get people to do one for free.

Re:Answer

[bhsx]

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?

Re:Answer

[topham]

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.

Re:Answer

[Anne Thwacks]

Doen't CUPS have to be working for kde printing to work?

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

socket://printer.here.com:9100

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...

Re:Answer

[w0lver]

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/

Re:Answer

[bahamat]

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.

Re:Answer

[phliar]

No, not every OS X Compatible printer is supported by CUPS.

And vice versa. MacOS X doesn't support the HP LaserJet 1150 although it's supported by CUPS.

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.)

Re:Answer

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Three little letters:
K D E

You want a pretty little shell, install the thing.

Re:Answer

[michrech]

"KDE Menu" (Start Menu equivelent for Windows users)

"Settings"

"Print Manager"

Right-click -- "Add Printer/Class"

Choose connection (from local ports to various network settings)

Choose brand/model

Test

Done.

Oddly, it's *very* similar to the steps needed to set a printer up in Windows.

What is so difficult with this?

(All that and I didn't even mention that I use Gentoo for my distro!)

(DOH!)

Re:Answer

[wobblie]

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.

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.

use Mandrake

[nocomment]

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?

Reference

[MrNonchalant]

The article that is referenced is here:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horr or.html

Configuring CUPS

[jimpop]

forgoet the CUPS application tools, user http://localhost:631. The www interface at least works all the time.

Re:Configuring CUPS

[Rei]

I think we really need to use a standardized package installation method, and that all developers who want to be taken seriously use it. There's a couple out there, and perhaps one will eventually become the standard. Even looking at, say, apt: If a user ones software they should:

A) Not have to find all of the varied repositories for different kinds of software on their own; it should come with a huge trusted repository list, and potentially update that list on its own if the user requests it.

B) Not be stuck by physical dependancies. If a compiled version is not available that matches your setup, it should automatically download either a source version and compile it (and get the necessary libraries), or a standalone version.

C) If there is an error in the install of a package (regardless of the method the installation is attempting), it should try a lesser version of the same package.

Windows has a big advantage on Linux when it comes to installation because we have so many versions of the same libraries floating around. We need to fix this.

CUPS printer detection

[corvair2k1]

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. ;)

IIRC...

[imroy]

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.

LACKING!?!?

[FreeLinux]

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.

[kosmosik]

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.

Re:It has little to do with CUPS itself.

[LWATCDR]

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.

Re:It has little to do with CUPS itself.

[flynns]

"But Mr. Dent, the PPD file has been available on our web site for the last nine months."

"Oh yes, well, as soon as I heard I went straight round to fetch it, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually saying anything about it or anything."

"But the file was available."

"Available? I had to finagle my way into a non-advertised server to download it."

"That's our Linux Support Server."

"With Telnet."

"Ah, well, the HTTP interface had probably gone."

"So had the T3. I got it at FIFTY bytes per second."

"But look, you got the file, didn't you?"

"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was made available fifteen directories deep, stuck on the other side of a dusty symlink with a label saying "CONFIDENTIAL -- BEWARE OF LAWYER."

Wonder why?

[MarkGriz]

"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?

Re:Wonder why?

[topham]

So nobody is allowed to complain that something is lacking? They have to fix it themselves?

Isn't the idea that the community can do what people can't, or won't do for themselves.

Some people don't have time to do what would have to be done.

no common interface

[jaymzter]

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!

Such is the nature of the beast...

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:Hear no...see no...speak no...

[c0d3h4x0r]

"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.

You're a FreeBSD developer, aren't you?

CUPS

[loginx]

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.

Re:CUPS

[Just Some Guy]

Both Gnome and KDE offer very nifty printer configuration apps [...]

Amen to that. I'm partial to the KDEPrint system, and wish that it was half as easy to configure network printers in Windows as it is through the nice KDE GUI.

For those who didn't catch that, let me repeat it: in my experience, it's much easier to configure printers (particular network servers) in KDE than it is in Windows. As far as I'm concerned, this particular problem is well solved.

Or Ubuntu

[slashdevnull]

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.

The KISS Principal

[WombatControl]

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.

Re:The KISS Principal

[Hognoxious]

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.

I'm inclined to agree. The more I think about it the more I come to the conclusion that many usability problems can be solved - without loss of flexibility when it's needed - by the judicious application of either an 'idiot button' or 'expert mode'.

How 'bout the book?

[TVmisGuided]

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)

Re:How 'bout the book?

[quietlysubversive]

The point is, the average user shouldn't need to read a BOOK to set up a printer

Needs to be as simple as windows printing.

[haplo21112]

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.

Re:Needs to be as simple as windows printing.

[johnw]

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

Re:Opposite experience from ESR

[Hognoxious]

I went downstairs to my GF's Powerbook

Wow, your mom has a double level basement!

amazing but slow on a large network

[TimMann]

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.

Autodetection

[VStrider]

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.

Mm...

[ledow]

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.

The point

[Sunspire]

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.