Epson Stylus C84 printer setup

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Miguel Mendez [mailto:flynn at energyhq.es.eu.org]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 2:21 AM
> To: Ted Mittelstaedt
> Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: Epson Stylus C84 printer setup
>
>
> On Tue, 4 Jan 2005 21:10:46 -0800
> "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm at toybox.placo.com> wrote:
>

> I don't understand where all this animosity against CUPS comes from, but
> it's not the first time I've seen people flaming against it. If you
> don't like it, don't use it. CUPS is very easy to troubleshoot, perhaps
> you didn't bother reading the man pages. Enable debugging log mode and
> read the logs, all the info is there.
>

Since the entire point of CUPS is to automate printer setup, if you have
to enable debugging and read the man pages you have defeated the point
of the program.  You also take longer than 10 seconds which pretty much
means you just self-invalidated your example here.

> Setting up my USB laserprinter takes 10 seconds with CUPS.

That is only because the version of CUPS that you use knows about your
model of laser printer.

> Drop the ppd
> file,

And that is only because someone wrote a PPD file for your model printer
and that it is actually correct.

> point the browser at localhost:631 and configure the printer.

Hmm - one more TCP daemon listening at a port that could be busted into.

> Done. The computer is a tool to get the job done, and most people have
> better things to do than spend more time than needed setting up their
> printer. It's also worth mentioning that Samba 3.x and CUPS integreate
> seamlessly.
>

And for people that really don't want to spend time setting up their
printer, they are best off purchasing a printer that is well supported
by all these make-it-easy programs.

But, this limits the choice of printers somewhat.  When I bought my Epson
C84 it was not completely supported.  I bought it anyway because it was
one of the few models that had separate ink resivors and that had support
under UNIX.  If I did what you did I would have followed the typical
sketchy advice off the lists and been stuck with not all features working,
and no way to be able to query the printer for ink levels.

But if you did what I did you would have complete support because you
spent the extra time to get the bits together to make it work.  This took
me a longer time than you yes.  But, I get to laugh when people who
have those money-sucking HP color inkjet printers have to go
throw away an all-in-one ink cartridge because Cyan ran out and they
still have a half-resivour of black ink left - then run out and buy another
$60 all-in-one cartridge.

> > Also, too many people out there have got the idea that CUPS is
> > somehow required to make their printer work.  Not good.  This
> > leads to less understanding of how things work.
>
> That's not true. Don't assume that someone who uses CUPS doesn't know
> what's going on.
>

Don't put words into my mouth.

> > It is the same with computers.  I know of people who have
> > Windows boxes that are so highly configured it takes them
> > literally weeks to put backgrounds/sounds/games/doodads/etc.etc.
> > on every little thing of their PC.  To me it is sad to see
> > this same attitude encroaching on FreeBSD.
>
> Flawed analogy :-)
>

Well, if you honestly believe that then that's an indication that we
aren't completely lost yet, saints be praised.  I won't spoil your
faith, then.

> And, for the nth time, please, don't top post.
>

I generally top post when the answer is a complete answer, meaning the
question is
embedded in the answer.  I generally don't top post when I'm just responding
with
a one-liner.  If you review my postings you will see not all are top posted.

The primary reason for doing it this way is to defeat the sorts of people
who
have got into the bad habit of reading a short way into a long post then
jumping to a response, usually with a bunch of invalid assumptions, made, of
course,
because they didn't bother to read all the way to the end of the post where
they
would have seen that their initial assumptions were wrong. :-)

The secondary reason is that it's easier for the reader to not have to read
the
question twice.  (once in the reply, once within my answer)

Ted