[cups] A primer on CUPS and printers

[Johnnie W Adams]

Hi,

     This is all super helpful!

     My specific problem right now is going from the old 1.3.7 version to
the new 1.6.3 version as I move from one machine to another. (I can't go to
a 2.x version for a while.) I am having extreme trouble getting
authentication working. I've yet to see a pop-up box for it. I normally get
a login box when I configure a printer on the old 1.3.7 version; on the new
one, I just get Forbidden. I'm not seeing a difference in cupsd.conf that
explains it, either.

Thanks,

     John A

On Thu, Feb 18, 2021 at 9:52 AM Jörg Thümmler <listen at vordruckleitverlag.de>
wrote:

> Am 18.02.21 um 15:14 schrieb Johnnie W Adams:
> > Hi, folks,
> >
> >       I spent the first ten years of my time as a UNIX/Linux admin
> working
> > with very large systems that didn't use printers.
> >
> >       Now I do manage printers, and am finding it much rougher going
> than i
> > had expected. I'm right now working on moving CUPS and a couple hundred
> > printers from a very old version of Linux to a new one. (RHEL 5 to RHEL
> 7,
> > and no, it was not my idea to let that old RHEL 5 machine live this
> long.)
> > I get the pieces, but I don't yet have an overview of what I'm doing.
> >
> >       Can someone recommend a primer or a reading path through the CUPS
> > documentation?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> >       John A
> >
>
> Hi,
>
> you might have seen, the localhost:631 website has quite good references
> for the configs. Mostly you don't need that more.
>
> Apples view on this you can find here:
> https://opensource.apple.com/source/cups/cups-30/doc/sam.pdf
>
> There will be more in the www, but usually, if you don't have to manage
> very special things, this is enough. If your users use modern software,
> as office, webbrowser, mailer using a graphical desktop, printing will
> be done as in window$.
> Other software (if without own special drivers) should put out
> postscript, which cups converts into the printer language, the used
> printer understands. Usually the "lpr" command is used this way.
> And you can write own "drivers"  and pipe the data to an "raw" printer,
> which just sends the data without conversion to the used printer by "lpr".
> If you have simple txt data, you can use "enscript" to generate ps from
> that.
> A thing i often use as a shortcut for programming graphic output from
> data without complex office stuff is: producing html output, then
> converting in pdf by "wkhtmltopdf" and then converting to ps by "pdf2ps"
> and then sending as ps to a ps printer. Sounds strange, but is fast and
> good quality...
>
> hth - feel free to ask further...
>
> --
> cu
>
> jth
> _______________________________________________
> cups mailing list
> cups at cups.org
> https://lists.cups.org/mailman/listinfo/cups
>


-- 
John Adams
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