On Tue, 2005-08-02 at 08:33 -0500, akonstam@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > The time has come to upgrade our thinking about printers. Since we are > using cups system-config-printer needs to be put on the back shelf. Or at least made a lot more CUPS-friendly, as in not clobbering custom configurations every time it is run. > Go to the CUPS web interface http://localhost:631 and use it to > configure your printers. Have found the CUPS drivers to be limited and inferior to the ones available through system-config-printer - presumably partially as an inducement to buy the commercial version of CUPS. Mixing CUPS admin tools and system-config-printer, and/or KDE-cups tools, can definitely result in severe pains in the posterior and loss of a lot of custom configuration work if you don't backup incrementally/frequently while messing with it. > At the same time print pout the CUPS user and > CUPS system administrators documentation and learn how to use the > command line configuration tools of cups. Must admit to not having done that. Will have a look. > I recently tried to configure a lab with 50 machines and a print-server > using system-config-printer. After screwing up royally I used the CUPS > interface and things worked out form the get go. > > Let me tell you one thing to convince you that this is the way to go. > You want to have a client to print to a print server. How do you do > it? You do nothing. Just print from the client and it finds the > server. The down side of that convenience in our environment is that, unless some tricks are played to limit the browse addresses, the user may be confronted with a list of several hundred printers, many of which are at unknown and distant locations (but then our network administrators are working under a low-bidder contract and are suspected of being brain- damaged). Printing is a work-in-progress. Phil
