The nightmarish problem of installing a printer

[Polytropon]

On Sat, 18 Sep 2010 15:09:57 -0700, perryh at pluto.rain.com wrote:
> Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 17 Sep 2010 15:10:45 -0700, perryh at pluto.rain.com wrote:
> > > Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> wrote:
> > > > I would like to have ONE thing that is used for printing,
> > > > and that does support ALL printers ...
> > > 
> > > Isn't that exactly what CUPS is supposed to be?
> >
> > Obviously not.
> 
> Er, I said "is supposed to be", not "is" :)  "Common Unix Printing
> System" certainly sounds as if the intent was to be the "ONE thing
> that is used for printing".  Whether they did a good job of it is
> another question entirely :(

It seems that you are mis-interpreting the C in CUPS. :-)

The "Common" refers to the fact - and this really is an advantage -
that similar versions of CUPS can be used across many UNIX and Linux
operating systems; there's also support for the big desktop environ-
ments KDE and Gnome. Even Mac OS X uses it. This makes it common.
In fact, it's great that one can use PPD files on all those systems
that have CUPS, but the *need* to refer to arbitrary external files
(instead of using what's installed - like gs) makes it less useful,
but still powerful, and sadly very complex and sometimes complicated.
Maybe this is the price of being common to many different systems...

For further autopsy of "Common" refer to the C in CDE. :-)



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...