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

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:08:59 -0800
Helge Blischke <h.blischke at acm.org> dijo:

> 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,

A thousand thanks. That worked perfectly. It saved me hours of work.

I did have a couple issues:

1) I have no idea what "all the filters and backends" refers to. I
ignored the instruction and apparently suffered no evil in doing so.

2) I had to google to find out that you stop cups by changing
to /etc/init.d/cups/ and issuing the command ./cups stop, and start
again by the command ./cups start. I add that information here in case
someone else as dumb as me reads this thread in the future.

Thanks again!