I want to smash CUPS

[vakkotaur]

When I made the switch from Mandrake (and I was running Mandrake, not Mandriva) to Fedora Core I lost the ability to print. I tried to rectify that a while ago and ran into that which is CUPS. The Common Unix Printing System is a nice idea that is a pain to set up and should not be. Eric S. Raymond wrote a rant about his experience trying to make CUPS work in early 2004.

Today I decided to try again. By strange coincidence, Eric S. Raymond called jmaynard inquiring about setting up printing with KDE, just as I was attempting the same. My reaction was that "It still doesn't work!"

I did eventually find a web page that told me what file to edit and how and so did that. Then came the joy of restarting CUPS. This was simple, once I went to the command line. The wonderful KDE GUI which I generally like managed to hide information too well. And then I got to the local CUPS web interface and, eventually, made that work. It took a few tries. Once, it looked like thing were working but nothing printed. That's not good. An error message is annoying, but at least it says something happened, or failed to happen. Silent failure is a Bad Thing. Another try with a different option and the printer, at long last, took off.

All this took far too long. ESR called a bit later about another matter and said he had gotten things working about the same way.

I'm glad that I can print again, but annoyed it took that amount of fiddling around to get there.

Comments

[aatheus.livejournal.com]

Yah, getting printing in linux to work right is still hit-or-miss. Oddly, it worked for me immediately in Ununtu Edgy, then Fiesty. Even found my brain-damaged Epson multi-function.

[yakko.livejournal.com]

I've had a love-hate relationship with CUPS ever since I've encountered it. On one hand, yay, SVR4-style lp commands! On the other hand, boo, MacOS X's GUI panels to configure CUPS aren't working. Or boo, it silently ignores some or all of my print jobs.

Basically, what I had to do was go to the local web admin interface and add the printer queues myself. Apple may have fixed their GUI to properly configure the printers, but they still left me with stupid names for the queues when I wanted to print from a terminal, so the CUPS admin interface was how I set it up.

There were other problems when I tried to get CUPS working under Linux (like when I said lp my_great.jpg, it'd print it instead of ignoring it silently or printing reams of garbage). I found it an annoyance to have to remember which file it is to uncomment the magic line which allows application/octet-stream to be printed via the various filters. Or something like that. I've honestly forgotten again, and Apple shipped their CUPS without that deficiency.

CUPS is fine, it's just that the way distributions ship it that's annoying or frustrating. At least now it's somewhat easy to get a working driver for a printer, though I still prefer using a PostScript printer over anything else.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

This seems rather odd to me. CUPS has always worked well here, and seemed like a major improvement over the various choices (lprng, shudder) that preceded it.

Printing from 16 scattered PCs at the library has been working well using CUPS too, even though they are running on (ugh) Fedora.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Well, my experience is with Fedora and also I tried from Xbuntu and had the same problems. I hadn't tried with Wolvix as I don't expect to print from the laptop and my desktop install is one of the later alphas that I know I'll replace. Yet I did look on the Wolvix forums and saw others having similar troubles, even referring to ESR's horror story page.

The printer is an HP LaserJet 4Si which is by itself on the network. My problems with CUPS are pretty much the same ones ESR wrote about: It acts like it should be simple and then fails to be, and just spits out "you're wrong" messages when it's even being at all informative if things aren't working. This, alas, has not been a single experience that annoyed me for a while one day. It's happened a few times, only this time two things were different: I got the %@$& thing working, and I wrote about it.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I can't understand why. All my printers, both here at home and at the library, are similar standalone units with their own network interfaces (usually some flavor of HP JetDirect.) They have always worked for me first try. I do all CUPS configuration either through the web interface (http://localhost:631) or using the command line. I've not messed with KDE stuff, admittedly.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I used the KDE stuff with Mandrake and things just worked, as I recall. It wasn't a difference I was expecting with Fedora, and certainly not Xbuntu - though there's no KDE there, of course. I do expect a bit more hands-on work with Wolvix or other Slackware based systems, but nothing as irritating as this has been. Yes, I had significant work to make wireless work, but that I had expected to be somewhat twitchy.