Adding printer in FC4 - radical suggestion

[Phil Schaffner]

On Tue, 2005-08-02 at 08:33 -0500, akonstam at trinity.edu wrote:
> The time has come to upgrade our thinking about printers. Since we are
> using cups system-config-printer needs to be put on the back shelf.

Or at least made a lot more CUPS-friendly, as in not clobbering custom
configurations every time it is run.

> Go to the CUPS web interface http://localhost:631 and use it to
> configure your printers.

Have found the CUPS drivers to be limited and inferior to the ones
available through system-config-printer - presumably partially as an
inducement to buy the commercial version of CUPS.  Mixing CUPS admin
tools and system-config-printer, and/or KDE-cups tools, can definitely
result in severe pains in the posterior and loss of a lot of custom
configuration work if you don't backup incrementally/frequently while
messing with it.

> At the same time print pout the CUPS user and
> CUPS system administrators documentation and learn how to use the
> command line configuration tools of cups.

Must admit to not having done that.  Will have a look.

> I recently tried to configure a lab with 50 machines and a print-server
> using system-config-printer. After screwing up royally I used the CUPS
> interface and things worked out form the get go.
> 
> Let me tell you one thing to convince you that this is the way to go.
> You want to have a client to print to a print server. How do you do
> it? You do nothing. Just print from the client and it finds the
> server.

The down side of that convenience in our environment is that, unless
some tricks are played to limit the browse addresses, the user may be
confronted with a list of several hundred printers, many of which are at
unknown and distant locations (but then our network administrators are
working under a low-bidder contract and are suspected of being brain-
damaged).

Printing is a work-in-progress.

Phil