[cups] Newbie seeks help / FreeBSD 12.0 / Brother MFC-7860DW

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

My thanks to Tim Mooney for responding to my (desperate?) plea for help.

I actually did get printing working... somewhat... on my FreeBSD system,
in the end.  It was a struggle because I made pretty much every mistake
that a person could make while trying to do this one "simple" task.

Firstly, on the CUPS web interface (localhost:631) I mistakenly assumed
that I would first need to do "Search for new printers".  Of course, that
was wrong... CUPS *had* already found my printer so it wasn't considered
"new" anymore.  And I was totally perplexed when the search for "new"
printers resulted in a message saying that there were none. :-(

Eventually I figured out that all I really needed to do was to click on
the "Add printer" thing and then check off my specific printer, and then
supply the *proper* .ppd file that I ended up stealing a copy of from
my Ubuntu Linux system.

Oh yea! And there were two more minor complications, these both being
arguably due to some Bad Choices made on the part of whoever wrote the
package dependencies list for CUPS on FreeBSD.

To get things working on FreeBSD, I needed to explicitly/manually install
avahi, in order to actually be able to print to this NETWORKED printer,
because avahi is *not* listed as a prerequsite for the CUPS package on
FreeBSD.  Once I did that, then things *sort of* started to work, but
nothing was coming out of the printer and CUPS said that the print job,
although properly queued and everything, could not be printed because
my printer could not be found. :-(  And I was like "Wait... WHAT?? How
could you, CUPS, not find my printer if you already found it AND allowed
me to "add" it????"

It turned out that there was one more separate thingy that I also had
to install and that's needed in order to print to a networked printer
with CUPS, and that was/is the nss_mdns package.  Here again, I will
probably be having a word with whoever did the prerequsites list for
CUPS on FreeBSD.  I guess that you don't need either avaho or nss_mdns
*if* your printer is connected vuia a direct USB (or serial or parallel)
line, but if it is networked... as most are nowadays... then yea, in that
case you need both avahi and nss_mdns,  So thos etwo separate packages
*should*, arguably, be listed as required prerequsites for installation
of CUPS itself, I think.  (This whole process would have been a whole
lot less painful if they had been.)

Anyway, after that, stuff started to print.  That's the good news.

The bad news is that whereas my Linux/Ubuntu system (which is on the same
network) can and does print stuff (e.g. PDFs) to this same printer both
quite quickly and quite nicely, trying to print the same documents from
my FreeBSD system is (a) really really slow, and also (b) produces VERY
ugly output.

I suspect what is happening is that Postscript docs, which *could* be
sent to my printer directly, on the Linux system *are* being sent to the
printer directly, but on FreeBSD they are instead getting passed through
something like Ghostscript to renderd them down to bitmaps or something
before printing... and that process is both really slow *and* makes the
actual printed output look like crap.

I haven't time to work this problem now, but I'll be back later on,
seeking advice for how to debug this issue (or these issues, plural).

I'm assuming that *somdewhere* I should be able to find some helpful
logging that will show me what CUPS thinks it is doing at each step,
right?


Regards,
rfg