Print dialogs without CUPS

[mulvihill@tiscalinet.it (Ben Mulvihill)]

Hello,

I am running Sarge, use Gnome as my desktop, and until recently
had printing working successfully using lpr and magicfilter. I
do not have CUPS installed. The print dialog would present me
with a number of alternative printers including my default printer
and an option custom. If I selected this I could type in
something like -Phpdj5l to select an alternative printer.

After updating to Gnome 2.8 and the latest Epiphany, Firefox and
Abiword packages I see the print dialog has changed. I now
get entries like lp@:64 and no custom option. It looks as though 
Gnome applications now expect to have CUPS installed. Is this the
case, or can I continue to use my old setup, and if so how?

Many thanks to anyone who can shed some light on this.

Ben Mulvihill