On mardi, juin 25, 2002, at 02:07 , Kurt Pfeifle wrote:

> Martin Costabel wrote:

>> I'll wait and see. Right now, cups on OSX is at least as broken 
>> as OSX's own printing system (and most other Unix printing 
>> systems): Beautiful web interface, but impossible to configure 
>> unless you have special insider information,
>
> The "special insider information" is all in the excellent CUPS 
> documentation.
> I don't know anything about Mac OS X, but a lot about CUPS (my 
> PowerBook was
> loaned to me for 4 weeks to test CUPS on Mac OS X). So I compiled 
> CUPS from
> the sources and it works flawlessly with different printers, 
> PostScript and
> non-PostScript -- but *only* from the commandline, because I 
> didn't know how
> to bolt it into the native Print Center (and had no time to find out or

Here is one example: Our default network printer has its own 
address and is an HP Laserjet. You cannot get more standard than 
this. So I point my browser to http://localhost:631 and get the 
nice CUPS interface. I go to "add printer" and find that I have to 
choose a "device". The choices are

AppSocket/HP JetDirect
Internet Printing Protocol (http)
Internet Printing Protocol (ipp)
LPD/LPR Host or Printer

Nothing obvious here, so I read the documentation diagonally. Still 
not obvious, so I take one of the 3 most promising-looking choices 
at random (not http).

Next step: Device URI. There is a list of examples:

     file:/path/to/filename.prn
     http://hostname:631/ipp/
     http://hostname:631/ipp/port1
     ipp://hostname/ipp/
     ipp://hostname/ipp/port1
     lpd://hostname/queue
     socket://hostname
     socket://hostname:9100
        
I choose one of the 2 possibilities that go with the choice of the 
device. CUPS seems happy and reports that my printer is "idle, 
accepting jobs." I choose to print a test page. Nothing happens, 
the job is reported as cancelled. I try to print a ps file using 
lp, then lpr. Nothing happens, no message whatsoever. lpstat and 
lpc don't show anything about my print jobs. I try successively the 
other 5 possibilities. Same result.

Of course, I had done the same thing a long time ago with CUPS on 
Solaris and on LinuxPPC, and this had worked, but I forgot how it 
was done (Typical situation for Unix printer configuration if you 
are not an administrator who has to do this every day).

Then I use /usr/bin/lpr, and this works, because I had configured 
the printer in netinfo, following some advice from some mailing 
list. Not an Apple doc, though. And this is not obvious either. One 
has to define properties rm, lo, sd, name, and lp.

/etc/printcap is neither used by /usr/bin/lpr nor by CUPS (CUPS 
writes to it, but not any nontrivial content).

Finally: I said, I'll wait and see, because what I am mainly 
interested in is getting remote access to a USB deskjet printer, 
and from what I can see about the USB backend in CUPS, it expects a 
/dev/usb/lpd or something similar, in any case an entry in /dev, to 
talk to the printer, and this hasn't shown up on OSX yet (10.2 
maybe?)

--
Martin




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