[cups.general] Migrate printers from Ubuntu to Debian?

[Helge Blischke]

John Jason Jordan wrote:

> Can I migrate the printers installed in Jaunty to a new, fresh install
> of Debian testing (Squeeze)?
> 
> Specifically, I have eight printers installed in Jaunty for a total of
> four laser printers that I own. I have so many laser printers because I
> do short run textbook publishing. Getting all these drivers installed
> and tweaked was no small task.
> 
> When I installed Debian testing I bought a brand new hard disk for my
> laptop. Then I installed the old Jaunty hard drive in a USB enclosure.
> I boot to Debian, but everything on my Jaunty hard disk is a click and
> drag away.
> 
> It would be awesome if I could find a folder with my printers in it on
> my Jaunty hard disk and drag it to the Debian hard disk. Is this
> possible? If so, how?

You could try the following steps:

(1) make shure your new installation has at least all the filters and 
backends of your old CUPS installation. If not, install the missing ones
(maybe it is sufficient to copy the binaries over, but there is no 
guarantee).
(2) stop the running CUPS
(3) copy your old /etc/cups/printers.conf to the new installation
(4) copy the complete contents of your old /etc/cups/ppd directory to the 
new installation
(5) start your new CUPS
(6) see what happens.

It might be that you need to do some tweaking afterwards, but the bulk of 
your old work should have been retained.

Helge