On Sat, Jul 27, 2002 at 11:53:57PM +0200, Andreas Mohr wrote:
On Sat, Jul 27, 2002 at 12:13:57PM -0500, David D. Hagood wrote:
I've been having trouble with my RH7.2 LPRng based printing, so I decided I'd try installing CUPS. After fighting for hours to get this so-called easier printing system installed and working, I finally got to where I could print from Linux apps. Now, however, Wine steadfastly refuses to bring up a meaningful print dialog.
Yep, I've always been asking myself how this company came to name itself Easy Software Products. At least the CUPS install on Debian is rather problematic. You even have to type in printer URLs *by hand* in several cases ! The menu choices are not exactly non-confusing. A web-based system could be considered to be *made* for a good context-sensitive help system, yet there's none to be found.
I also encountered some string garbage (typical stray pointer or so) in the printer URL input some months ago.
Add to that the fact that CUPS gets rather completely rid of the useful Unix filter machanism, and you really start to wonder whether CUPS really is better than say lpd+printtool. Quite the other way around or so...
It IS realy better, especialy if you have a lot of machines and real printers with many options (different trays, duplex, etc.). And the non technical people just love the graphical print tools (qtcups, gtklp kprinter). And the best feature (best for me :) of cups is that it significantly reduces the "I can't print" helpdesk requests. Setup the printserver and for the clients all what you need to do is to install cups and start it, nothing more. You can still use filter, you can define them in ppd file, but normaly you don't need them because today most people print from applications and not from the command line and the applications use postscript as output.
bye michael