Re: Why CUPS?

[Rogério Brito <rbrito@ime.usp.br>]

Hi there.

Sorry for jumping in late in the thread.

On Dec 08 2009, Anthony Campbell wrote:
> On 08 Dec 2009, Girish Kulkarni wrote:
> > After my problems with CUPS --- discussed in a previous thread
> > http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2009/07/msg01157.html --- I
> > decided to move to LPRng for print job spooling.

/me wears the hat of the magicfilter maintainer. :-)

Nice. :-) lprng and magicfilter is a killer combo. Once they are
configured, things "just work".

I, BTW, print everything that I need with the pcl3 drivers from
ghostscript to inkjet printers (well, that's what I have at my disposal)
and I can switch between 3 different HP printers (just unplugging them
and plugging).

I also have an Epson Stylus Color II printer (that's connected via a
parallel port) and it works fine with this setup also.

The only problem that I have is me forgetting to turn the printers on,
but no software would take care of that anyway. :-)

> > While it possible that I wasn't using CUPS correctly (I tried!), I
> > clearly can use LPRng with far less effort.

Well, I may be called an "old-school" Unix user, but I like the
traditional Unix way of doing things and lprng fits my needs very well.

But there is some danger here: lprng is an orphaned package in Debian
(which means that it currently has no one looking after it).

If you want to ensure that it has a long life, please help maintaining
it.

> > I wonder then why Debian prefers to bundle CUPS as its default print
> > spooler?

Pointy clicky interface, perhaps? (But if I am not mistaken, there are
some GUI interfaces for lpr/lprng also).

> I very much agree with this. I ditched CUPS two years ago or longer in
> favour of LPRNG plus magicfilter. Much easier to set up and the results
> are better. Unfortunately a lot of apps these days expect you to be
> using CUPS as a matter of course. Herd mentality.

One hint that I included in the NEWS file of the lprng package:

,----[ NEWS.Debian.gz ]
| lprng (3.8.A-2.1) unstable; urgency=low
| 
|   Programs based on the gtk library (which includes a lot of popular
|   programs in Debian) have lost the ability to print to lpr/lprng.
| 
|   A way to work around this problem of gtk+2.0, please use:
|  
|   + for a one-user setup, include an entry in the file .gtkrc-2.0 in
|     your home directory with the line:
| 
|     gtk-print-backends = "file,lpr"
|  
|   + for a system-wide setup, include the same line in the file
|     /etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc
|  
|   It may happen that your setup will be broken again if GTK 3.0 doesn't
|   read the gtk-2.0 files or don't provide an appropriate upgrade path.
| 
|  -- Rogério Brito <rbrito@ime.usp.br>  Mon, 18 May 2009 21:36:28 -0300
`----


Regards, Rogério Brito.

-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8
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