On Tue, Mar 07, 2006 at 11:33:02AM +0000, Danny Pansters wrote: > On Tuesday 7 March 2006 08:21, Gary Kline wrote: > > On my test system I'm defaulting to "cups"; printing on any > > flavor of *nix has always been painful ... which is why I > > stick with plain ol' lpr::: it Just-Works{tm}. So on my > > printserver and everywhere else I have lpr/lpd going. > > > > Under Gnome on my test platform I've tried to get things to > > print via my printsrver. I see that Gnome thinks things are > > printing. Not. Do any of you print wizards know what I'm > > missing? > > Usually this is caused by confusion over which lpr to use. The one that comes > with base (lpd) is in /usr/bin, the one installed by cups is > in /usr/local/bin. When searching $PATH the first will be used, which is the > wrong one. IIRC the cups port has a 'make replace' target. Or (what I usually > do): cp /usr/bin/lpr /usr/bin/lpr.not and I put NO_LPR=yes in /etc/make.conf > so that when rebuilding world all of lpd is skipped.
Are you saying that, in effect, I should use cups on my printserver? --or at least use the cups lpr? > > > PS: 5 gold stars for anybody who can 'splain why cups exists. > > Well for just a printer server lpd is fine and maybe easier. But for a > desktop > where you want a good filter/driver for those shiny PDFs, cups is almost a > must. I use a HP all-in-one (and before that an officejet). Good luck writing > a printcap for that. Even more so getting a suitable filter. With cups this > is automagical, and no sub par quality or bleak colors (well at least with > HP's drivers, graphics/hpoj and hpijs). Granted, if you fail to get it > running automagically you're in for some reading, but it's well documented. > If all you ever do is print plain text then cups may be overkill. I've got the ghostscript stuff set up for my HP Deskjet-500 (still using since 1992). lpr -> hpif (I think); hpif calls the ghostscript tools and I can print anything. Postscript, pdf, graphics, OO files, whatever. > > Also, cups supports several protocols, most prominently ipp which arguably is > the standard now. Since I have my printer hanging on the network this comes > in handy. > > My experience with lpd getting it to print decently with magicfilter on the > officejet was always rather painful. Cups just works. It also does scanning > and I can read my camera's flash card with it, but that has nothing to do > with cups, rather with the device drivers. > > HTH, > A little, thanks. If I use the cups lpr on my printserver, will/(*should*) my test server with Gnome and cups just-work, or is that a black-hole question? Are there are cups type tutorials around? I haven't googled around. The nutshell of it is that when I first started messing with SVR2 in 1986 (then SVR4, then FreeBSD) it took weeks (totaled) to get things-printer working with lpr/lpd. It's time to get out of my Ludditeism and move to CUPS. gary -- Gary Kline [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.thought.org Public service Unix _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"