[cups.general] cups-browsed

Till Kamppeter till.kamppeter at gmail.com
Sun Mar 24 10:09:26 PDT 2013


On 03/24/2013 05:10 PM, franz.pfoertsch.brose wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> in the last week I updated my ubuntu-box to 13.04 beta. With this update I got cups 1.6.2. I was very impressed about this.
> But, I was much more impressed about the package/daemon called cups-browsed.
> 
> I know it is from cups-filter, but there is no documentation around.
> 
> Is the cups-browsed the answer to http://www.cups.org/newsgroups.php?s641+gcups.general+v656+T0+QJohannes+Meixner
> 

Yes, it is.

I am the upstream maintainer of cups-browsed and it is part of the
cups-filters project at OpenPrinting. I have started its developemnt
making a daemon which does Bonjour browsing. This means when there is a
CUPS 1.6.x server or a Ubuntu CUPS 1.5.x server, or newer, a client
running cups-browsed and CUPS (any version) automatically gets local
queues pointing to the Bonjour-broadcasted queues of the server,
recovering the configuration-less client functionality in networks with
CUPS 1.6.x server and clients of any CUPS version including 1.6.x.

Tim Waugh from Red Hat has contributed legacy CUPS broadcasting and
browsing functionality to cups-browsed, which can be activated in the
/etc/cups/cups-browsed.conf file. This allows interaction with older
servers and clients which do not support Bonjour broadcasting. On
servers running CUPS 1.6.x cups-browsed can CUPS-broadcast the shared
local queues so that clients with CUPS 1.5.x and older get these queues
automatically available. On clients running CUPS 1.6.x cups-browsed can
catch CUPS broadcasts from servers with CUPS 1.5.x and older.

Any combination of CUPS broadcasting/browsing, BrowsePoll, and Bonjour
browsing can be activated to cater for any mixture of CUPS servers and
clients. Default configuration is doing only Bonjour browsing, the
recommended way to work in pure CUPS 1.6.x networks. Note that Bonjour
broadcasting is the new standard and it allows also non-CUPS devices to
participate (for example you can print with Apple iOS devices on Ubuntu
CUPS servers).

Future plan (already in the works) is to make cups-browsed also
Bonjour-browse for IPP-based network printers with known page
description languages (IPP Everywhere/CUPS/PWG Raster, PDF, PostScript,
PCL) for driverless (no need of printer-model specific code or data on
the computer) printing and automatically create queues for these. This
is especially intesting for mobile devices to be able to print on most
shared printers in local networks without need of a printer setup tool
or driver installation (like iOS devices already do, but on a very
restricted range of printers).

> and maybe a solution for
> http://www.cups.org/newsgroups.php?s25400+gcups.general+v25400+T0
> 
> please, anybody should give me some enlightenment in this area.
>

If you do not want to modify the CUPS server, you need to compile and
install cups-browsed on Mac OS X (only cups-browsed, not the rest of
cups-filters) and install it on your Macs. Configure cups-browsed for
doing BrowsePoll.

Upgrading the server to CUPS 1.6.x would be another possibility, but you
also need to install the full cups-filters package on the server so that
it is able to print with drivers. And if you also have legacy Linux
clients (CUPS 1.5.x or older) you need cups-browsed on the server to
CUPS-broadcast for these.

> Is there any documentation/howto or explanation available.
> 

The README file in the source code describes how to use cups-browsed and
how it works. On an installed Ubuntu Raring (13.04) system this file
resides as /usr/share/doc/cups-browsed/README.gz.

   Till





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