Re: starting cups

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

Joe Zien wrote:

> I installed deb 3.1 sarge and it is working fine but can't
> print a test page.
> On my libanet 2.8.1, a debian distro, when it boots up
> "cupsys starting" is shown.
> On sarge, the "cupsys starting" is not shown.
> How do I start cupsys in sarge?


You probably don't have cups installed.

I've never understood what needs to be installed for cups, but I think
I've had success with:

    #aptitude install cupsys foomatic-filters-ppds cupsys-driver-gimpprint

<Rant>
I have no idea why printer drivers are in packages with such names as
foomatic and gimpprint, which don't seem to give any indication that you
probably want these packages even if you're not running the GIMP or know
what 'foomatic' has to do with basic printing. Ah! Believing that even
the description of these packages is uninformative to the uninitiated, I
just double-checked the description on cupsys-driver-gimpprint and found
that it's now transitional to cupsys-driver-gutenprint. Ah, now there's
a package name I would have just untuitively recognized as being
important for printing. (I hope you can recognize sarcasm.) This is part
of the reason why printing still sucks on Linux. Why not have a package
called "cupsys-printer-drivers", and maybe a package called "cups" that
is a virtual package upon which "cupsys" and "cupsys-printer-drivers"
depends? Maybe there's a good reason, and I'm just being a whiner.
Sorry. Debian is a great OS, and I very much appreciate the developers
and package maintainers, but polish is still needed in some areas.
</End of rant>

-- 
Kent