No problem to report ... I was pleasantly surprised to learn that my ancient Redhat- style CUPS printer configuration files easily transferred to many new machines running Debian Bullseye and Bookworm.
I print cover pages with the machine and username they came from. It took a while to realize that I did not need to use the web configuration interface for small per-machine tweaks, just vi on the "Info" lines of the /etc/cups/printers.conf file (which contains all the printer configs) for each user machine. This is ESPECIALLY important for my HP laser printers ... there may be THOUSANDS of different models in the little scroll box of the web interface. I seemingly must scroll through most of that list every time I make small tweeks to a printer configuration. Besides a few soon-to-be retired ancient Redhat/CentOS machines, and one sad experience with resource-hog Ubuntu, I am migrating all machines to Debian Bookworm, eventually. Two machines will be configured for Debian 11.7 Bullseye. I plan to upgrade those to Bookworm 12.2, and document procedures for that, in order to simulate a future upgrade to Debian 13.2 . I worry a little about future versions of CUPS that use "improved" (incompatible) printer description files, or worse, will not support my ancient built-like-tanks HP and Brother laser printers, with their huge-capacity toner cartridges (cheap per page!) and older Postscript. If that happens, a print server machine can run Bookworm forever. Perhaps a low-power Arduino will serve as a print server. Perhaps I should worry instead about lifting 50 pound printers when I am 80 years old, or finding trustworthy third party toner cartridge suppliers, if Brother and HP stop providing CUPS driver support for legacy machines. Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected]
