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Printer Books Media Operating Systems Software Unix Book Reviews

CUPS - Common Unix Printing System 248

Posted by timothy from the oldie-but-goodie dept.
McSnarf writes "What is CUPS, anyhow? And does it make sense to buy a book about a GPLed piece of software? CUPS is an acronym for Common Unix Printing System, software that was written to replace the rather powerless printing system found in Unix and Linux. If you run any current Linux distro, the chances are that you already use CUPS for printing." That being the case, read on for McSnarf's review of Michael R. Sweet's book on the topic.
CUPS - Common Unix Printing System
author Michael R. Sweet
pages 650
publisher SAMS Publishing
rating 10
reviewer McSnarf
ISBN 0672321963
summary More than just a complete reference to CUPS

Background Information

CUPS is developed and maintained by Easy Software Products, which is co-owned by the author of the book, Mike Sweet.

The complete table of contents for CUPS - Common Unix Printing System, aka "The Octopus Book" can be found here. The CUPS web site also contains errata lists and example code. In addition, Easy Software Products sells a companion CD for the book, only available on their web site.

Who should read it?

If you do not use a printer with Unix or Linux, or if you do and you are perfectly happy with the results (maybe because the distro came with all the right stuff pre-installed), this book is not for you.

However, if you are serious about printing, if you are considering replacing the outdated legacy printing system that came with your Unix or Linux or if you are a developer even remotely interested in Linux/Unix printing, this book is for you.

Did I mention that the Octopus Book is also very helpful when it comes to understanding IPP, the Internet Printing Protocol? If you tried to read through all the RFCs on IPP out there and managed to understand IPP afterwards -- congratulations! I tried that, failed, bought the Octopus Book and finally understood.

How will it help users and admins?

This book will show you how to install, administer and use CUPS. While the documentation that comes with CUPS is very good already, having everything in one handy package has its advantages, especially as the book goes into more detail than the on-line documentation. In addition, this book will explain to you in great detail how to extend CUPS. If you've ever wanted to be able to directly print some rather unusual file type -- or need a mechanism to create PDF files and email a copy of each PDF whenever you print them to a certain printer, this book will tell you how to do that.

Anything for developers?

Sure. Complete API documentation with loads of example code. Everything from "How can I add good printing support to my application" to "How do I write a printer driver?" is in there.

Likes and dislikes

Of course, no book is perfect. This book comes close, but you should know that a lot of it is already available for free on the CUPS web site. It also lacks details on how to rip the old printing system out of your legacy Unix -- but if you've got root, this is something you should know anyhow.

Another thing - it is not as funny as Terry Pratchett. But I can live with that.

As you might have noticed, I really like this book. It definitely made my work much easier -- I work for a manufacturer of (among other things) large printers and this (by now well-worn) book has been granted dedicated space on a very crowded desktop.

You can purchase CUPS - Common Unix Printing System from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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CUPS - Common Unix Printing System

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  • lpd powerless? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Merlin83 ( 159955 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:18PM (#6106314)
    After the story [slashdot.org] a few days ago about how it was so flexible and could be used for queueing up MP3s etc?

  • Heh. (Score:5, Funny)

    by American AC in Paris ( 230456 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:21PM (#6106341) Homepage
    And does it make sense to buy a book about a GPLed piece of software?

    ...after all, you could just write "RTFM!" on a Post-It and stick it to your monitor.

    Wah-Lah^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Walla^H^H^H^H^H Viola^H^H^H^H^H Voilà! Instant CUPS book!

  • Well ... let's see here ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SuperDuG ( 134989 ) <be@@@eclec...tk> on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:22PM (#6106350) Homepage Journal
    And does it make sense to buy a book about a GPLed piece of software?

    Of course not, god knows that reading a man page or a how-to is much easier than an illustrated bound guide.

    What the hell kind of question is this? Of course it makes sense, especially if you don't know much or anything about the software. What do you think that everyone is some kind of "programmer" that will just take the source and read it to find out what it does? Of course not, cups is fairly easy to setup especially with all the gui's to configure it, but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't hurt to read a book on the subject to make it a little easier.

    This might shock ya, but it also "makes sense" to click that little "Donate" button on GPL'd software websites. It's not as common on some would let on. Supporting open source is more than just saying "I use open source".

    • um, the poster was asking a question that was answered in their "review" via the who is this book good for section.

      to comment on the review, i myself found the review quite lacking in substance, but the book might be the same. in my experience with CUPS (ok, i'm using a couple 'a lexmark printers, but they were fairly cheap), it's a major PITA to setup and work reliably.
    • Ha ha ha. My thoughts exactly.

      No, no. Don't buy a book. Shoot, if you can't make sense of the man's, then why not just write your own Unix printing system? Come on, real men don't need books.

      This makes about as much sense as asking if you should buy "Moby Dick" or a Bible since they're in public domain.

      • Re:Well ... let's see here ... (Score:4, Funny)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @02:17PM (#6107379) Journal
        This makes about as much sense as asking if you should buy "Moby Dick" or a Bible since they're in public domain.

        Actually, there is no reasonable reason buying a Bible. If you don't have one, just let one of your local evengelical churches know, and they will give you at least one. My copy was kindly provided by the Gideons, and was a most entertaining read, with the exception of chronicals, which should have been cut, and included in the special features deleted scenes section (apocrypha) if required. My favourite part was Leviticus, which explains a load of things the christians aren't meant to do. Oh, and the Latin version is better.

      • Bible's in the public domain? (Score:5, Funny)

        by DrCode ( 95839 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @02:35PM (#6107596)
        Are you sure? In the US, copyrights stay in force until something like 50 years after the death of the author. But religious people believe that god wrote the bible, and they certainly don't believe that god is dead.

        There could be a BIG lawsuit coming out of this.
      • I had to get the Bat book back when I was still mucking around with Sendmail configuration. And I only ever used it once and then copied the same sendmail.cf file from installation to installation until I dropped the server for a more modern mail server...

        Hmm "man mobydick"? Would that give you the full text of the book or just the cliff notes?

  • You may be a CUPS user... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Mononoke ( 88668 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:22PM (#6106352) Homepage Journal
    If you run any current Linux distro, the chances are that you already use CUPS for printing.
    Even well-camouflaged Linux distros like Mac OS X.

  • Stupid, stupid, stupid. (Score:5, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:23PM (#6106373) Homepage Journal

    We don't need a stinking printing system, remember that all these nifty computers are going to bring us the "Paperless Office"! At least thats what we were told in the 80s.
    • What they meant was that, as a cost cutting measure, they weren't going to be stocking the employee washroom with toilet paper anymore.
    • My office is paperless. I work for the ISP part of a large university and we pass all our information around using a web-tool we wrote (and email, too). We have a printer, but most people dont have a use for it. I guess the 80s were telling the truth to my school.

  • Of course it makes sense to buy the book (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:24PM (#6106375)
    Everyone has spent the last decade complaining that Community-maintained software has poor or no documentation. A good reason for that is that its more fun to code than to write down in english what you did after the fact. If I have to shell out money to entice somebody to write good documentation for something I use, then I will definitely do it.

    • Re:Of course it makes sense to buy the book (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Good documentation doesn't come after the fact!

      Good documentation is part of the design process!

      You "design" the software and out of that falls the code and the doc.

      You won't be paying *good* money for doc that's done after the development has ended.

      That's one of the major downsides of opensource/community software - every one wants to be Buck Rodgers and do the cool coding stuff rather than being grown-up and professional about it and assigning proper roles.

      Too much software is "coded" and not "design
      • Oh please, name your proprietary well-documented projects. Oh, then name all the well-designed ones in the same problem space that failed because all that got done was design.

        Everyone buys into this designing software theory, but unless you have the budget of NASA, the best results I've seen have been from hiring good people to write good code first. This results in a solid product that works well and is consequently easy to document.

        Current software engineering seems to guard aganist coders being absol
      • Actually, I've found that most development shifts from documentation to coding back to documentation on a regular basis, something like:

        preliminary design -> prelim code -> detailed design + documentation -> final code -> final documentation

        then starting all over again...
    • good documentation

      there's a major difference that and just documentation. man pages are documentation. there's web sites with how-to guides for other documentation. and there's plenty of open source software based books that are just not worth the read. so the author was trying to let you know if this book is going to be worth the $$ you spend.

  • CUPS is part of the 'killer app' trilogy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Alkarismi ( 48631 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:24PM (#6106380) Homepage
    CUPS coupled with Samba and OpenLDAP now provides a one-stop replacement for authentication and file/print for most organisations currently running a MS back-end. Great to see some dead treeware on the subject

    • Re:CUPS is part of the 'killer app' trilogy (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Azghoul ( 25786 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:35PM (#6106506) Homepage
      Now there's a book I'd buy. The problem I have is seeing all this great stuff from a bird's eye view: How would someone know how all this stuff connects and interoperates? Or even, how would one know that they DO interoperate?

      Is there a book that talks about this kind of top-down view? How to Administer a Small Business Using Nothing But OSS and Your Brain.

      Maybe even a "cookbook" series:
      - Implementing CUPS for Sweet Printing Stuff.
      - Using OpenLDAP: Why the hell you should.
      etc...

      Anyway, just a thought.

    • Re:CUPS is part of the 'killer app' trilogy (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Alkarismi ( 48631 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:39PM (#6106543) Homepage
      Oops, a bit premature with the 'submit' button there.
      I meant to add that Samba + CUPS + OpenLDAP will do pretty much everything most businesses need for a back-end serving their MS desktops. It will also pave the way for bringing in new platforms (whether they be Open Source, MacOS X, whatever).
      We've got a full case study illustrating this trilogy here:
      http://www.siriusit.co.uk/support/casestudi es/k_g_ case.html
      CUPS will give equal quality/ease of use/simple admin printing to your *NIX and MacOS users as your Windows users. Couple this with an OpenLDAP authentication backend and you're in a great position to diminish your companies reliance on MS software, or even eliminate it on the back-end entirely.
      Don't want to go on too much more, but the features coming up in Samba 3.0 (due rsn), especially enhanced LDAP support and MS AS interoperability make this trilogy a no-brainer!
      • You might want to check out an admin script, which works and is used for doing all sorts of things (CUPS, ldap, samba, updating, and firewalls*) at sloppyadm.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net] or the project page [sourceforge.net] I have written most of it, and would be happy to have contributions/bugreports/etc :)

        The setup is being worked on as is a kommander based GUI (using ssh, so it can be run on a workstation)

        Unfortunately, the machine I usually work on it on is out for the momement (Power supply died)

    • Great idea. Getting a clean duplication of Windows printing abilities is a pain as the docs out in the world are outdated, inaccurate and too Unix-side oriented to help an admin who's trying to support put a nice Linux back-end on a Windows front-end.
      For example the following topics should be covered:

      1) Native Windows Drivers vs Using a Generic Postscript driver and CUPS as the RIP.

      2) Setting up Point-and-Print driver downloads properly with Samba and CUPS. (and why the drivers still may not work properly

  • Unix printing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Arethan ( 223197 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:24PM (#6106385) Journal
    I must admit, I've never been very good at setting up printers in Unix. If I don't have access to the Redhat printconf gui utility, I'm pretty lost. This is bad considering that I'm a unix admin at heart. I guess I've never really had the need to configure many printers on Unix boxes, and when I do, it is always conveniently enough a RedHat box.

    I might just have to pick this book up. Anyone have any other suggestions on how to demystify printing in Unix? I understand how to use the lpr command, and how to kill jobs with lprm and list them with lpstat, but I'm pretty much a noob at configuring printers. A complete guide on how it all works would be nice. I'm pretty sketchy on the whole "filters" idea, and wouldn't know where to start to set up CUPS or LPD if all I had was a command line available.

    • Re:Unix printing (Score:4, Funny)

      by SuperDuG ( 134989 ) <be@@@eclec...tk> on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:37PM (#6106524) Homepage Journal
      This is bad considering that I'm a unix admin at heart.

      If this post is true, lets hope that you're not a "unix admin at work".

      Demistifying printing in Unix? Since when is RedHat Unix, are you working for SCO?!

      • Re:Unix printing (Score:3, Insightful)

        by krray ( 605395 ) *
        I beg to differ. I was sitting here thinking the EXACT SAME thing.

        I can setup and use/maintain at work various Unix's. Linux, BSD, and OS X. At home I went to install my HP 1100 (connected to my Mac upstairs) on my RH box.

        I downloaded drivers. Jiggled this. Played with that. Spent almost an hour on it before I gave up. Started playing with my RH test laptop which I typically only use for GUI stuff (while my main box is 99% command line use).

        The printer was just there. I went back to my original box and p
        • So you're an IT point and click guy. No shame in that, but if you aren't comfortable with command line or Kuduzu just "making it work" for ya, perhaps its time you hung up the "Unix Admin" hat and just start wearing the "Computer Guy" hat.

          Unix admins know Unix, they don't sit around and watch redhat autoconf it for them, so like the parent I would classify you also as ... not a Unix Admin.

    • Re:Unix printing (Score:5, Informative)

      by DevNull Ogre ( 256715 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:39PM (#6106535)
      LinuxPrinting.org [linuxprinting.org] rocks. Lots of good information with quality specifics for just about every printer that works with Linux. It has taken away much of the pain of printer configuration.

    • Re:Unix printing (Score:3, Informative)

      by geders ( 206556 )
      I've never used Redhat's GUI thingy, but KDE has a _great_ Printing Manager built in that has made all this configuration stuff easy as (gasp) Windows. Its available in K Control panel, under Peripherals->Printers (also in the KMenu by default too). Anyway, on my Gentoo box I have never had a second of problems printing with this handy utility...it will even scan a subnet to find all your network printers, so conveinent!

    • Re:Unix printing (Score:2, Informative)

      by trynis ( 208765 )
      Actually my experience is the opposite. I recently installed a NAT (I use my old PPro for this purpose) and connected a USB printer (HP Deskjet 930C) to it. I installed Mandrake 9.1, but didn't bother to configure the printer, since I've heard that it is supposed to be tricky. Then I installed Mdk9.1 on my other two boxes as well. Sometime later I accidentally tried to print from one of those, and to my surprise the printer connected to the NAT came alive and printed!

      It just worked out of the box using CUP

      • Re:Unix printing (Score:4, Informative)

        by joestar ( 225875 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @03:04PM (#6107895) Homepage
        Remember: one of the CUPS main developpers is employed by MandrakeSoft and Mandrake Linux has been the first Linux distribution to provide CUPS by default. That could explain the good CUPS support in Mandrake 9.1.
        • Actually, this isn't the case; Till does Foomatic and is a main ESP Ghostscript developer, but he isn't directly involved in CUPS development (he does do lots of testing, packaging, and contributes patches regularly, tho...)
    • The ORA book on Network Printing is pretty good. I'll admit that I found (and probably still find) UNIX printing a pretty arcane setup, and the differences between SysV and BSD don't make life any easier.

      It's interesting to note that Sun has dropped all the printing coverage from the Solaris 8 System Administrators course (it was in Solaris 7). Where I work, we do all our printing through JetDirect which takes a lot of the pain out of manually tweaking interface files.

  • More than just a complete reference to CUPS (Score:5, Funny)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:25PM (#6106394)
    It has all the low down on saucers as well

  • Why not BSD lpd? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by WetCat ( 558132 )
    I hate that CUPS... it's bulky and cumbersome to administer.
    I don't have a network of users usually, for occasional printing it's an awfully complex system.

    • Re:Why not BSD lpd? (Score:3, Informative)

      by amorsen ( 7485 )
      I have had no end of trouble getting non-postscript printers set up with plain lpd. Then you add the trouble that a whole lot of printers really do not like getting jobs from more than one host via the lpr protocol. For me, the IPP protocol and the www-based setup of CUPS has been a godsend. It gets better every day, as more and more printers get native IPP support. No more walking to the printer to try to interpret its display or blinkenlichts.
    • Actually, I find CUPS is a terrible printing system compared to LPD. It tries to add a slew of additional features that mainly result in incompatibilities and inconsistent behavior. LDP might be old and simple but it works EVERY time. Not to slam the CUPS developers, I did try to like CUPS for about a 6 month run, but now you'll have to pry LPD from my cold dead hands.
    • If you like BSD lpd, consider using LPRng from www.lprng.com

      While keeping the simplicy and usability of BSD lpd, LPRng adds lots of nice features. It's ifhp print filter is excellent too and has support out of box for LOTS of printers.

  • Finally! (Score:5, Funny)

    by inertia187 ( 156602 ) * on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:27PM (#6106412) Homepage Journal
    Finally, a non-recursive UNIX acronym!

  • Hahaha (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Plasmic ( 26063 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:30PM (#6106451)
    And does it make sense to buy a book about a GPLed piece of software?
    Ever heard of O'Reilly [oreilly.com]? They've got books about tons of open source software: sendmail, BIND, Samba, CVS, emacs, FreeBSD, bash, etc.

    You don't need books about GPL software. Just read the source code. Riiight.

  • pratchett (Score:4, Funny)

    by grantsellis ( 537978 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:34PM (#6106494) Homepage
    Another thing - it is not as funny as Terry Pratchett. But I can live with that.

    Dude, if you can be as funny as Pratchett while writing about configuring printers then you're definitely in the wrong field.

    • Re:pratchett (Score:3, Funny)

      by m0nkyman ( 7101 )
      Actually, if somebody can be as funny as Pratchett, while writing about configuring printers, I'd say he/she/it's in exactly the right field, and I'd gladly maim anyone who tried to convince said person otherwise*. The ability to make dry technical matter interesting is very rare.

      *Yes, I'm kidding. I wouldn't condone or endorse maiming anyone (except maybe spammers who use my email address in the 'from' field).

  • I should know this? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by C Joe V ( 582438 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:42PM (#6106567)
    It also lacks details on how to rip the old printing system out of your legacy Unix -- but if you've got root, this is something you should know anyhow.

    That's bogus. Anyone who has installed a system on his or her home computer will have root, but nowhere near all of them will know where all the components that have to be ripped out are located. I know I don't.

    That said, I suppose replacing a legacy system with CUPS might not be considered on-topic for this book... but there seems to be a niche for more generic books about Unix printing that would cover such things.

    CJV

    • That's bogus. Anyone who has installed a system on his or her home computer will have root, but nowhere near all of them will know where all the components that have to be ripped out are located. I know I don't.

      ...I imagine somewhere near all of those that buy a 650 page book about the printing system of their computer does...

      Kjella

  • Web based configuration (Score:3, Interesting)

    by luugi ( 150586 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:44PM (#6106579)
    I really like the fact that we could configure and see the status of the printer from a web browser.

  • cups is pretty cool. (Score:5, Informative)

    by FroMan ( 111520 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:46PM (#6106600) Homepage Journal
    I used to use apsfilter w/ lpd for all my printing needs. Which worked, once it was setup. Though I never did get samba printing exactly correct. It was a bear. It was eaiser to setup sendmail than getting printing working in linux.

    Well, a short while ago we picked up a new printer. I was dreading going into apsfilter setup again and wrestling with lpd and all that. I looked around cups' site looking for a decent howto. Nothing for a simple "just do it" documentation. I decided to try out gentoo's site for documentation, which is awsome. Here [gentoo.org] is an awesome howto for getting cups setup in gentoo. You could probably glean the information for doing it in other distributions also from this howto.

    I know a lot of folks get sick of gentoo folks pushing it all the time. But documentation and howto's are one of gentoo's biggest strengths. I really reccomend folks look at the gentoo docs when they are trying to figure something out.

    Nope, I don't have any affiliation with gentoo other than a user and the occasional bug reporter.

  • CUPS (Score:4, Funny)

    by sulli ( 195030 ) * on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:48PM (#6106614) Journal
    If you run any current Linux distro, the chances are that you already use CUPS for printing.

    But those of us who use OS X use CUPS for drinking. Large quantities of Mint Juleps, in particular, this past weekend.

    • But those of us who use OS X use CUPS for drinking.

      Yes. Just tonight, in fact, after spending all day doing CUPS programming on OS X, I drank heavily.

      What's on the docket for tomorrow? Track down the latest bug, see if that's the only thing left, and then - you guessed it - drink heavily.

      Hopefully I'll be done inside a week, and I can stop dealing with CUPS programming until Panther comes out.

  • Asking for pain... (Score:3, Funny)

    by confused one ( 671304 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:50PM (#6106636)
    Now if only someone would write a book telling me how to get my Lexmark winprinter to work under linux...

  • CUPS color management? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sakusha ( 441986 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:51PM (#6106644)
    There is a lot more to printing than writing device drivers. I've been using CUPS on MacOS X for quite a while, since there are no other drivers for my old Epson 1520. I'm a bit dissatisfied with the color management abilities of CUPS. Sure it has custom color tables, but no real way to integrate with Colorsync or other color profiling systems. I can turn off all color management in CUPS, hoping it prints a relatively neutral profile, and then let Colorsync work it's profile to that, but you don't really get the full dynamic range compared to real official Epson drivers with real official Colorsync. So I'm not even getting as good quality color output and matching as with MacOS 9. Oh well, I suppose I'll have to get a new printer with proper drivers one of these days, but I like my old 4color printer for press proofing, I can't stand 6 or 7 color printer proofs when I'm targeting CMYK film output.
    • I don't understand what you mean by a "neutral profile" and then ColorSync working its profile to that. If it isn't color managing the data, it's just going from the document's color space to printer color space without transformation. What would be the "relatively neutral profile" and what would be ColorSync's profile?

      I'm not nitpicking to be a dick. I'm interested in how to get color management working with CUPS, too, and I just want to be sure I understand what you're saying.
    • Actually, the current release *does* support basic color management and can generate CIE Lab or XYZ color data for printer drivers; however, none of the existing drivers use this (yet)...

  • Documentation Rocks (Score:5, Insightful)

    by redptam ( 602168 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:52PM (#6106651)
    Never knock great documentation. I would have to say that one of the major problems with open source software today is that many of the programs do not have enough great documentation.

  • Why use CUPS with OS X? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by chia_monkey ( 593501 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:52PM (#6106656) Journal
    A simple question. Why would an OS X user want to use CUPS? I know there's a good reason it is built in, I just haven't found the need to use it yet.

    Maybe I'll use it, maybe I won't. I remember thinking "PDF workflow handling in OS X? Why bother?" but it turned out to be a great help when working on newsletters and such and mailing them out from Illustrator.

    So if anyone could post a good "5 - Informative" reply to me, I'd love it.
    • Why would an OS X user want to use CUPS?

      I believe it's handy for legacy printers that lack OSX drivers.

    • If you ever print to an OS X network printer, you are using CUPS... you just didn't know you were using CUPS. :)

      In fact, I believe that Apple uses uses CUPS for all printing as of 10.2... at least, my laptop appears to do so.

      My buddy and I spent a long time trying to figure out how to "use" CUPS from a MacOS X client to a Linux server... until finally, we just tried to print something, and it Just Worked... the CUPS printer appeared in the MacOS X print selection drop down (due to IPP broadcasts, I suspec
    • I was able to share my USB Brother laser printer with my Win2K box via CUPS.

      Well?

  • printing (Score:5, Funny)

    by micromoog ( 206608 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @01:00PM (#6106732)
    And does it make sense to buy a book about a GPLed piece of software?

    Of course not, just download the man pages and print them ou-- oh, right.

  • The only CUPS... (Score:3, Funny)

    by decepetion ( 632646 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @01:01PM (#6106735)
    I am interested in, have to be at least C.
  • With Berkeley LPD you can do:

    sap|write documents to sap-out:\ :sd=/var/spool/lpd/sap:\ :if=/usr/local/lib/print-sap-out:\ :af=/var/spool/lpd/sap/acct:\ :lp=/dev/null:\ :bk:sh:mx#0:

    This sets an input filter on an otherwise dummy printer, which can be a shellscript or whatever executable. It will receive your request data on stdin, and gets args that specify the source host and loginname of the user submitting the request.
    The above was in real-life use on a Linux system, the script took the input file and

    • Re:Question for CUPS experts... (Score:4, Funny)

      by gpinzone ( 531794 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @01:26PM (#6106935) Homepage Journal
      sap|write documents to sap-out:\ :sd=/var/spool/lpd/sap:\ :if=/usr/local/lib/print-sap-out:\ :af=/var/spool/lpd/sap/acct:\ :lp=/dev/null:\ :bk:sh:mx#0:

      See, that's what I like about Linux. It's so simple to configure. Anyone can use it!

  • print dialogs in applications (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ZorroXXX ( 610877 ) <hlovdal@gmSTRAWail.com minus berry> on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @01:40PM (#6107072)
    I really like CUPS and it is quite nice on the "system" side.

    What is missing with regards to printing in unix is something better that the standard (unfortunately), ultra primitive printer options dialog box given to the user, i.e. a prompt asking for your favourite lpr command.

    When I select File->Print in an application in X I should be presented with a dialog box with access to all the selected printer's specific options (for instance print on both sides, etc). As long as this is not the case printing in unix sucks, although with CUPS it sucks less :)

    • I really like CUPS and it is quite nice on the "system" side.

      Yes, it can do almost as much as lpr could do 20 years ago. For example, using the CUPS version of lpq, I can almost imagine what it would be like, being able to actually see what's in a remote queue.

      I should be presented with a dialog box with access to all the selected printer's specific options (for instance print on both sides, etc).

      Sounds to me like you're bitching about X, and the complete lack of any strong, standard API that mig

  • And does it make sense to buy a book about a GPLed piece of software?

    That is one very naive question, so let me be the first to welcome you to Slashdot.
  • And does it make sense to buy a book about a GPLed piece of software?

    You mean, like, Perl [oreilly.com]?

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