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

[Helge Blischke]

John Jason Jordan wrote:

> 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!

O, sorry - I have put my fingers into the internals of various Unices for 
too long a time aqs to notice that how to stop and start a service is not 
obvious vor a "normal" user ...

Helge