CUPS vs Sun vs LPRng [LWN.net]

CUPS vs Sun vs LPRng

Posted Jul 19, 2007 12:09 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
Parent article: Apple buys cups

I have to take a bit of issue with the description and history in the
second paragraph. After running Solaris in the 2.4-7 days, trying to
configure and troubleshoot CUPS always brings back bad memories. CUPS
appears heavily based on that System V print system, and the
interdependencies of different programs and files do not seem to be very
well documented (other than "use lpadmin or the web interface").

LPR/LPRng configuration, on the other hand, is quite straightforward, and
things like magicfilter and foomatic (combined with more printer support
in Ghostscript) made printer configuration in that environment a
pleasure. Well, a pleasure for those of us comfortable with writing
shell scripts and editing well-documented printcap config files, which
admittedly is a shrinking percentage of the Linux userbase.

The one thing that CUPS makes easy and LPR/LPRng makes hard is selecting
different printer options. The old way required either making separate
print queues for different options (resulting in a combinatorial
explosion), abusing some ancient options (I use -i "indent N spaces" to
select N-up printing), or doing custom things (i.e. nothing else supports
it) with LPRng's -Z option. Since modern printers do have so many
printing options, this is really what drives CUPS adoption as far as I'm
concerned. (I currently have a laser printer driven by LPRng and a photo
printer driven by CUPS.)

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CUPS vs Sun vs LPRng

Posted Jul 19, 2007 16:04 UTC (Thu) by bkw1a (subscriber, #4101) [Link]

I agree with your comments about CUPS vs. LPRng. CUPS is very
desktop-centric, and focuses on making life easier for the end user.
I've found it to be a nightmare to manage, though, compared to
something like LPRng, which is focused on the back end.

CUPS does, indeed make it easy for the end user to add printers
without having to know anything about print filters. But how often
do users need to add printers? (Especially in an enterprise
setting.) With LPRng, creating a print queue is straightforward
for the administrator, and the configuration files are understandable
later.

For the end user, LPRng provides the wonderful ability to type:

lpr -P printer@printserver myfile.ps

without having to set up any printers on his/her local machine.

I take the Unixy view that the end user shouldn't need to know
what type of printer he/she's printing to. The print filters on the
print server should take care of this, and all the end user should
need is the printer name. I agree that this raises questions about how
to let the end user tweak the output, but my users have been largely
happy with "-Zsimplex", etc. for a long time.

CUPS vs Sun vs LPRng [How many printers do you need]

Posted Jul 19, 2007 17:32 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

In an enterprise setting, I see about 10 new printers a day (some are just moved from one network to another but its a lot of changes that seem to occur). Some organizations I have worked for have had 2-3 different printers on each desktop [black & white laster, color inkjet, special printer for slides]. People have made it a work habit to print out a copy of the legal forms etc over on Jack's printer in finance for his report etc etc.

Yes its a phenomenal waste of resources, money, paper, etc... but the problem occurs that when people are not comfortable with technology, they want an environment that they assured has a lot of redundency (in this case printers) in case they cant get something done by that unplanned meeting at 4pm.

CUPS vs Sun vs LPRng

Posted Jul 19, 2007 18:41 UTC (Thu) by mightyduck (guest, #23760) [Link]

Have you ever used CUPS or are you just talking out of your rear end?
With CUPS the user doesn't even have to know the printserver, the command
would be

lpr -P printer myfile.ps

The printers are automatically created on the users desktop via broadcast
(or polling in our case). I just create new printers on my print servers
and I'm done. CUPS is even so smart to combine printers with the same
name from different print servers into one class and use the servers
kind-of round-robin. All the filtering and everything is done on the
server.

CUPS vs Sun vs LPRng

Posted Jul 19, 2007 17:47 UTC (Thu) by emk (subscriber, #1128) [Link]

The other big advantage of CUPS is for laptop users, who roam onto all sorts of strange networks, and need to talk to a wide variety of printers. And CUPS handles this pretty well, though not nearly as well as MacOS X (which has ZeroConf auto-discovery of network printers).

It won't be too long before Linux users can see a list of all the printers on the local subnet, click on one, and print.

CUPS autodiscovery

Posted Jul 19, 2007 17:54 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

That only works if all those strange networks have printer broadcasting turned on -- IOW,
those "strange" networks are also running CUPS.

CUPS autodiscovery

Posted Jul 21, 2007 20:37 UTC (Sat) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

One thing I'd like to see is for CUPS to adopt DNS-SD for printer discovery. I wonder if Apple's acquisition of the code base will make this more likely. Probably not as they already modify CUPS on OS X to use it, but haven't bothered to contribute the code back upstream.

CUPS autodiscovery

Posted Jul 22, 2007 17:06 UTC (Sun) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

I guess you should never let some facts get in the way of a good troll. From the release notes for
CUPS 1.3b1:
- Added support for DNS-SD (aka "Bonjour") printer sharing (STR #1171)

http://www.cups.org/articles.php?L479