Thoughts on CUPS and printing

What features/apps/bugfixes needed in a future Puppy
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Guest

Thoughts on CUPS and printing

#1 Post by Guest »

Mepis, Knoppix (aonther live cd)......

PUPPY IS NOT EITHER OF THOSE..

PUPPY IS NOT TRYING TO BE LIKE THOSE..

PUPPY IS PUPPY..

IT IS A DIFFERENT ANIMAL..

Ok enough for my rant...

Would it not to be a good idea to see which apps peolpe on a whole prefer, get rid of the doubling, tripling of apps that do the same general thing and have CUPS.....Printing is important and CUPS makes it quite simple to share printers with XP & Win2k without the need for SAMBA.....The setup is quite simple...browser based config which can be accessed from any machine on a LAN....It's a reliable printing system and works..I have it running on a Linksys NSLU2 file server (well hacked anyway) and it runs great....

AND REMEMBER KIDDIES PUPPY LINUX IS PUPPY NOT (insert another distro here)

keep smiling

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Walt H
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#2 Post by Walt H »

NO! NO! NO! Please do not make CUPS the default! My printer has always worked fine under lpr and apsfilter, but I always have trouble (translate: lots of time required - too much time) making it work under CUPS.

I also think CUPS is overkill for those of us running stand-alone systems with non-networked printers; it is simply not worth the time often required to get it working. (I just spent parts of three days trying to get my 12-year old printer working under CUPS in Xandros and have also had trouble in Mandrake, Vector, SLAX, and Libranet.) In other words, I have never found the setup to be simple - the setup concept yes, but not in the excution. To me, it is not worth the extra HD space required if you run a stand-alone system.

I think the best thing is to make it available as a pupget or dotpup and/or make it available on the CD. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. :)
Walt

Now that you point it out to me, the answer seems painfully obvious.

Guest

#3 Post by Guest »

I dunno what the fuss is...

Took me five minutes to get it up and running on a hacked linksys file server....


And the web based setup is sooooooo easy to use

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Walt H
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Joined: Thu 02 Jun 2005, 02:07
Location: citizen of the world
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#4 Post by Walt H »

Anonymous wrote:I dunno what the fuss is...
The "fuss," as you put it is that, unlike lpr or apsfilter, my printer does not have a driver/ppd file included with CUPS. Half the time, it doesn't find my parallel port, either, even though parport and the parport_pc modules are installed and loaded.
Anonymous wrote:Took me five minutes to get it up and running on a hacked linksys file server....
Lucky you. I spent several hours the last time before I finally got it working under CUPS, about the only time I've ever gotten it working. With apsfilter, I never spend more than five minutes getting the printer up and running.
Anonymous wrote:And the web based setup is sooooooo easy to use
Again, this may be true for you; it hasn't been true for me. CUPS may be great if you are networking printers, but I'm not, and CUPS is overkill. Plus I think it is over 9 meg for CUPS alone, not including any required libraries or other files. Seems to go against the notion of Puppy as a lean, mean distribution.

I still say CUPS is best included as a dotpup or pupget, not as the default. Now, if there is room and a way to do it, I could see CUPS included in the distribution as an option. But if it is included as the only way to get printing in Puppy, I'll have to go somewhere else. My time is too valuable to me to go through that hassle again. Nor am I prepared to get another printer.
Walt

Now that you point it out to me, the answer seems painfully obvious.

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