On 03 Feb 2012, Russell L. Harris wrote:
There is a bit more to this matter than the package "lpr".
About a decade ago, the package lprng ("ng" meaning "next generation")
fixed most of the problems of the package lpr. Most importantly, the
author of lprng carefully documented the procedure for configuring the
printing system. And though lprng was carefully wrought and worked
well, lprng nonetheless was an elaborate patch of a legacy printing
system. In those days, getting printing configured properly was a
somewhat complex post-installation process.
Then cups was designed, and getting printing working properly in Linux
suddenly was a fairly simple matter. Things went well until cups was
purchased by Apple, since which event there have been some
improvements in printing configuration and management and some
regressions. And I miss the marvelous detailed cups test page, which
Apple replaced with a primitive and ugly version.
Today, "lpr" simply is one of the commands which cups recognizes;
that is, cups controls the printer, and "lpr" is an element of the
command set of cups.
For example, I print a man page on the default laser printer with the
command string "man -t packagename | lpr". And I print address labels
on a dot-matrix printer with the command string "lpr -Poki labels".
RLH
Interesting: I didn't know about the purchase by Apple. I always
preferred lprng to cups but for some reason one of my laptops no longer
gave me /dev/lp0 so I was forced to use cups on that machine. I had some
problems with cups last summer (had to take the USB lead out and put it
back after each printing) but at present things seem to be more or less