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Is LPRng Project Still Alive?
deeptrout asks: "The LPRng distribution hasn't been updated since mid-2004, the LPRng project website hasn't been updated since late 2004, and the LPRng mailing list has been dead since the April of 2005. What's going on? Is the project unofficially dead? Has anyone heard any news from Patric Powell, the author of LPRng? It'd be a shame if that is true. I really like LPRng's simple and yet robust reimplementation of the LPD model that allows to keep the configuration for an entire site with hundreds of hosts and dozens of printers in a fairly simple text file. What are we supposed to do now? Switch to CUPS? Something else?"
Just wondering. Surviving members of a project generally have a better idea than the community at large.
Nobody claimed cups was perfect. It does succeed in acomplishing everything of merit that LPRng does however. As for it being the De Facto standard, I will not argue the point. After all, modern distributions argue the point for me.
Sounds like it's dead. What's your take?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I lived in fear of each LPRng upgrade potentially breaking working printing functionality, and got tired of choosing a print filter package, only to have it disappear in upgrades to my distro. Then there was the fun when I was on the road, and needed to print at a client site (at least, when hooked to their network...), and needing to figure out the next magical incantaion. And I never really liked the config file for lpr anyway. Then I wanted to get photo printing working easily.
/etc/cups, and scped and untarred on the remaining machines, restarting the CUPS daemon, though I don't know if that was strictly necessary)
So, coupled with needing to look into it for my then-current job anyway, since there was a requirement of "no unencrypted traffic" when something could be considered "privileged", as some print jobs to the network printers could be (don't ask, it wasn't physical so much as potential sniffers on the network), I finally looked into CUPS. I decided to convert the least-critical machine on my home network to CUPS under the belief that I could always switch back by copying over a working config. You know what? That same night, I converted all the other *nix machines at home. It was that nice, that easy, that painless. Aside from CUPS already knowing about all my printers, sitting off on a stand-alone 3-port print server, it also was able to make better use of their features.
So, I'm now a happy CUPS user, and even had an easier time last week getting an HP LaserJet 1320 working on my *nix boxes (both simplex and duplex, draft, medium, and high qualities) than I did even getting the drivers and one printer instance onto my gf's XP SP2 laptop. (After the first, I just tarred up the modified files from
If you like LPRng, and it works for you, stick with it. For my money, I'm much happier with CUPS. And as a bonus, with all the print filters for a lot of common formats already there, I don't need to go through different steps to print PDFs, graphics, etc, I just lpr them.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
Any hardware-driven project will always be ready for updates, especially for end-user-serviceable products like printers. New models appear, firmware updates are made available from the manufacturers, and the programs that make it all work together need to be maintained.
The project could be very mature, beyond everyone's expectations. However, like those who meet Dracula, people may find that it sucks their life-blood away, and the best way to make it stop is to put a stake through its heart.