cups yet again

On Mon, Aug 06, 2007 at 07:14:25PM +0100, graham wrote:
> Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> >On Mon, Aug 06, 2007 at 05:02:07PM +0100, graham wrote:
> >>Yet another cups problem (the one program which makes me feel like I do
> >>when running windows - like putting a foot through the computer).
> >
> >So why run cups? Use LPRng and Apsfilter or foomatic print filters.
> >
>
> Cos what I'd understood from other threads was that this would mean
> swimming against the tide, since cups is now the default for both debian
> and gnome, and because I had understood that lprng was no longer
> supported. I'm really hoping to spend the minimum of time possible
> maintaining printers; they don't interest me much ;-)
>

LPRng does look a little long-in-the-tooth. The web page is dated '5
Oct 2004' for the same version as debian ships.

On the other hand, good'ol lpr is up-to-date (still the default,
constantly maintaind, on Net- and OpenBSD), sourced from OpenBSD. The
bug reports are rather silly, such as "Installing LPR over LPRng doesn't
work" (of course not, command file names), "lpr fails to modprobe the
paralell port" (of course not, that's your job), etc.

This is, in fact, what I use. Lpr with apsfilter. Simple to setup,
well documented. It works.

Doug.

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On 07 Aug 2007, s. keeling wrote:
> graham :
> > Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> > > On Mon, Aug 06, 2007 at 05:02:07PM +0100, graham wrote:
> > >> Yet another cups problem (the one program which makes me feel like I do
> > >> when running windows - like putting a foot through the computer).
> > >
> > > So why run cups? Use LPRng and Apsfilter or foomatic print filters.
> >
> > Cos what I'd understood from other threads was that this would mean
> > swimming against the tide, since cups is now the default for both debian
>
> Yes, it is swimming against the tide. Big deal, && fsck 'em.
>
> CUPS has made a mess of *nix printing. All you need to do to enable
> *nix printing is find your printer's driver, install lpr(ng), then
> hack /etc/printcap (which is pretty damned simple):
>
> lp0|To Your Left: \
> :lp=/dev/lp0: \
> :force_localhost: \
> :if=/usr/bin/foomatic-rip: \
> :ppd=/usr/local/ppd/Epson-Stylus_Photo_870-Stp870p.upp.ppd: \
> :sd=/var/spool/lpd/lp: \
> :mx#0:sh:
>
> It just works. CUPS is *way* unnecessary. The biggest problem with
> *nix printing is trying to figure out how to install something without
> dragging in CUPS too. :-P Even if you have lpr(ng) installed, CUPS
> chooses to replace them, and tends to get away with it! Be vigilant.
>

I ditched Cups a couple of years ago in favour of lpr + magicfilter. I
never have any problems, including network printing. Dead easy to set
up.

Anthony

--
Anthony Campbell -
Microsoft-free zone - Using Linux Gnu-Debian
http://www.acampbell.org.uk (blog, book reviews,
on-line books and sceptical articles)

--

Florian Kulzer wrote:

>
> The changelog of the newest Sid version of cupsys gives me the
> impression that there were some problems with the first Debian packages
> of the new upstream cups release (version 1.2.12-1, in Lenny right now).
> Maybe your problem ist just a case of installing at the wrong time. You
> could try if you can install version 1.2.12-2 of cupsys, cupsys-common,
> cupsys-client, and libcupsys2 (from Sid). Using "dpkg --purge
> --force-depends" should allow you to temporarily purge the old packages
> without removing anything else that depends on cups. This should be safe
> if you reinstall the new (or old) packages again immediately. (Famous
> last words...)
>

I'm starting to think it may be a kernel-related problem somehow. I
removed cups completely and installed lprng and the foomatic filter. At
first this gave me exactly the same problem as I had had with cups:
using foomatic-gui to print a test page produces single lines of
gibberish per page.

I then rebooted again. Now I am unable to get a test page to produce
anything at all. When I do lpq -P lp0 I get:

graham@dogmatix:~$ lpq -Plp0
Printer: lp0@dogmatix 'HL5040'
Queue: 1 printable job
Server: pid 3708 active
Unspooler: pid 3709 active
Status: cannot open '/dev/lp0' - 'No such file or directory', attempt
2, sleeping 20 at 12:03:42.777
Rank Owner/ID Pr/Class Job Files Size Time
active root@dogmatix+706 A 706 (STDIN) 27719 12:03:32

There is no /dev/lp0. dmesg says:

pnp: the driver 'parport_pc' has been registered
pnp: match found with the PnP device '00:0c' and the driver 'parport_pc'
parport: PnPBIOS parport detected.
parport0: PC-style at 0x378 (0x778), irq 7, dma 3
[PCSPP,TRISTATE,COMPAT,EPP,ECP ,DMA]
parport0: Printer, Brother HL-5040 series

There are no further references to lp0 or parport0

Googling gives me a few vaguely related symptoms; following one of these
I found the suggestion to modprobe ppdev. My kern.log then showed:

Aug 7 11:51:56 dogmatix kernel: ppdev: user-space parallel port driver

but the symptoms didn't change.

My printcap is:

lp0|HL5040: \
:lp=/dev/lp0: \
:force_localhost: \
:if=/usr/bin/foomatic-rip: \
:ppd=/usr/local/ppd/Brother-HL-5040-hl1250.ppd: \
:sd=/var/spool/lpd/lp: \
:mx#0:sh:

Graham

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