ESR is right

Posted Feb 27, 2004 1:06 UTC (Fri) by dank (guest, #1865)
Parent article: The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)

I agree with ESR's verdict. I have never found CUPS anything
remotely like easy. Figuring out how to set the default printer
without the GUI from the documentation was a nightmare.

For anyone wondering, here's how:
the user's default is set in ~/.lpoptions, and the system default is set in /etc/cups/lpoptions;
the handy command "lpoptions -d printername" will *overwrite* one of
those files with new contents that set the specified default printer.
It decides which one to write based on whether you are root.
So if you need to tell people how to change their default
printer, they have to know to look at both those files
and possibly run that command twice or remove ~/.lpoptions.

This might or might not be ok (what good is lpoptions if
it overwrites all the old options?), but it sure was hell to figure out.