print question: cups and lpr

[Danny Pansters]

On Tuesday 7 March 2006 08:21, Gary Kline wrote:
>         On my test system  I'm defaulting to "cups"; printing on any
>         flavor of *nix has always been painful ... which is why I
>         stick with plain ol' lpr::: it Just-Works{tm}.  So on my
>         printserver and everywhere else I have lpr/lpd going.
>
>         Under Gnome on my test platform I've tried to get things to
>         print via my printsrver.  I see that Gnome thinks things are
>         printing.  Not.  Do any of you print wizards know what I'm
>         missing?

Usually this is caused by confusion over which lpr to use. The one that comes 
with base (lpd) is in /usr/bin, the one installed by cups is 
in /usr/local/bin. When searching $PATH the first will be used, which is the 
wrong one. IIRC the cups port has a 'make replace' target. Or (what I usually 
do): cp /usr/bin/lpr /usr/bin/lpr.not and I put NO_LPR=yes in /etc/make.conf 
so that when rebuilding world all of lpd is skipped.

> 	thanks for any clues,
>
> 	gary
>
> 	PS:  5 gold stars for anybody who can 'splain why cups exists.

Well for just a printer server lpd is fine and maybe easier. But for a desktop 
where you want a good filter/driver for those shiny PDFs, cups is almost a 
must. I use a HP all-in-one (and before that an officejet). Good luck writing 
a printcap for that. Even more so getting a suitable filter. With cups this 
is automagical, and no sub par quality or bleak colors (well at least with 
HP's drivers, graphics/hpoj and hpijs). Granted, if you fail to get it 
running automagically you're in for some reading, but it's well documented. 
If all you ever do is print plain text then cups may be overkill.

Also, cups supports several protocols, most prominently ipp which arguably is 
the standard now. Since I have my printer hanging on the network this comes 
in handy. 

My experience with lpd getting it to print decently with magicfilter on the 
officejet was always rather painful. Cups just works. It also does scanning 
and I can read my camera's flash card with it, but that has nothing to do 
with cups, rather with the device drivers.

HTH,

Dan