One Year Later - CUPS Admin Still Lacking? 447
DopeyDad asks: "OK, it was close to a year ago (Eric's site says July 2004, but I'd swear the original rant came earlier last year) that Eric Raymond's tirade on the unfriendly status of configuring the CUPS printing system on Linux was published. Well, I've been struggling with setting up a new laptop and getting it to talk to my print server, using Fedora Core 3, and nothing seems to have changed -- the admin items for adding a printer are exactly as Eric described them back then -- unclear, confusing, and no where near as friendly as their Win* equivalents. Definitely not something I'd expect my Aunt Ethel to be able to figure out. What's going on here? Granted, FC3 is ready to be replaced, but I don't see any CUPS updates for it. Is work being done with CUPS to address Eric's original complaints, or has this issue fallen off the radar?" For those who are still frustrated with the CUPS GUI, how would you improve it?
Answer (Score:5, Insightful)
By using Mac OS X's interface to CUPS. [apple.com]
:P
Re:Answer (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing that's missing is seamless functionality and implementation, as usual. Coding cool stuff and coding pretty, highly portable stuff are two different things, and it's hard to get people to do one for free.
Re:Answer (Score:2)
Short Topic Blurb asked for dumb-wussy-user input, so I gave it to you.
Re:Answer (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Answer (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Answer (Score:4, Informative)
I can print to by S330 just fine from OS X. I cannot on the other hand print to it over my network. CUPS doesn't support it. (might now, haven't checked recently).
And for some reason Windows won't print to it on my Mac, so I've been swapping the USB cable back and forth. Kinda stupid.
Re:Answer (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Answer (Score:4, Informative)
If you dig through the CUPS documentation you learn that the 1150 is a PCL 6 printer so if you select "LaserJet 6" in the print setup tool you can print to the 1150. But Apple can't really expect Grandma (or even my non-geek lawyer friend) to figure that out.
(I may be misremembering it being PCL 6 and LaserJet 6, it might have been 5.)
Re:Answer (Score:5, Informative)
Many printer manufacturers use Carbon filters for OS X. Game over.
Now about ESR's comments, I never really saw what was so hard about it. Not that I'm claiming to be incredibly smarter than him, but the hardest part of setting up a printer using CUPS under Debian was knowing that I had to point my browser at http://localhost:631/ [localhost]. After that, what's so hard about clicking on Printers, Add Printer, then select the make and model? Seems pretty easy to me.
Maybe ESR wasn't using the CUPS web interface, but instead using some GNOME/KDE front end. Well then that's the problem because GNOME & KDE both suck anyway. For that matter, the OS X GUI front end to CUPS isn't all that great either. Really, the only great thing about CUPS on OS X is that when you plug in your printer, it just works and doesn't need to be configured.
Re:Answer (Score:5, Insightful)
"Settings"
"Print Manager"
Right-click -- "Add Printer/Class"
Choose connection (from local ports to various network settings)
Choose brand/model
Test
Done.
Oddly, it's *very* similar to the steps needed to set a printer up in Windows.
What is so difficult with this?
(All that and I didn't even mention that I use Gentoo for my distro!)
(DOH!)
Re:Answer (Score:3, Informative)
What I meant is that it is similar to the steps to manually setting up a printer in Windows (just going through my steps should have been clue enough, but you obviously missed it).
As for your description, well, it's wrong for about 100% of the "cheap-o" printers that many people will buy, and wrong for the rest, too.
There has never been a NEW printer, from about 2000 on, that I have been able to install by "plug it on, maybee i
Re:Answer (Score:3, Informative)
- Plug in printer
- (Possibly) install software from CD
- Print"
Odd - I think that's what I did when I recently installed Mandrake 10.1 (leaving out the install software part).
My Epson Stylus C60 inkjet works fine.
Re:Answer (Score:5, Informative)
This is completely incorrect. CUPS is a full featured RIP and postscript processor. It does support arbitrary binary printing, however, and this is exactly what happens when you print to cups from windows via samba. Please see the cups documentation [samba.org].
If cups is just a "dumb spooler", explain lease how the heck it can print pdf, jpeg, hp-gl, tiff, and hundreds of other formats directly to your postscript printer?
If you don't have a postscript printer, yes, you must use a ppd that calls a intermediary driver (e.g., hpijs) that cups just passes the job to.
Re:Answer (Score:3, Informative)
ESR's comments where not about adding a printer, but about setting up CUPS to be able to share and print on the network.
And he was right, I had exactly the same problem as he, because the default CUPS installation restricts the usage to the local address 127.0.0.1.
You cannot change that from the web interface, you have to delve through the CUPS configuration file.
Re:Answer (Score:2)
Tell me the difference where OSX CUPS GUI is better than official fedora. The way that you define printers is practically the same. Believe me I have both OSX and fc3.
Right way is done in printers:/// (ximian gnome or ubuntu) and in windows (if it would just stop scanning network printers, yep and that commes from me who never has anything positive to say about M$)
Re:Answer (Score:4, Informative)
K D E
You want a pretty little shell [kde.org], install the thing.
Re:Answer (Score:2)
Re:Answer (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a printer with jetDirect type of server interface. I have been a Un*x sysadmin for over 20 years, and it still took a week to get this working
Its simple things that floor you - How the hell are you supposed to know that the url for a jetDirect printer is
An example would fix this! A lot of the problems could be solved by better use of typefaces in the explanations, and less dumbing down. If you mean fully qualified domain name, then say so. If you mean port, then say so. If you can/must use an IP address instead, say so!Remember if your idiot cousin from the cake shop wants the printer to work, she will phone rent-a-nerd. If you are lucky, she will wear a low cut blouse and very short skirt for the occasion. She will not type urls into dialogue boxes, even if you use words of one syllable to describe it. She won't even think of plugging a USB printer into a Windows box by herself. The idea would not occur to her. And if it did, you both know she would phone you to come and get the USB plug out of the RJ11 socket shortly after.
And don't tell me about OSX - it took my son two months to get it working on his ibook. It could find the cups entry on my computer, but that did not work. It could not even find the printer directly. The one day, it started working by itself.
And don't even mention printing under windows as an example of what is "good" - it gives me pains in all the diodes in my left leg...
Re:Answer (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not saying there aren't any HP devices that differ from this, but in the last 8 years, I have never encountered anything different.
If you search HP's forums, there are many threads that deal with this. Hell, if it was under warranty, you could even have called HP's support.
This is what I find funny about "I've been a (insert OS) admin for X years" comments on slashdot. I *al
You're sick! (Score:3, Funny)
Wow, I didn't know they had running water in the Ozarks, let alone computers!
use Mandrake (Score:5, Interesting)
Or Ubuntu (Score:4, Informative)
amazing but slow on a large network (Score:5, Informative)
I would have killed it in disgust, thinking it really was hung, but first I did a "top" to see if I could tell what it was doing. Then my jaw dropped when I saw it running nmap and starting and stopping many other processes to try to connect to the open ports it was finding, so I let it finish and was fairly impressed. It really needs a progress bar, or better, to have printers pop up in the GUI as they are found.
Reference (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-hor
Re:Reference (Score:2)
*bump* (Score:2)
I'll never understand why all those kiddie forums replace good, old-fashioned Hypertext with some lame-ass propietary [url=lameass] scheme. It only makes the forums harder to use.
Oh, and ditch the 2 inch deep graphical sigs while you're at it. They detract from the content if there is any content.
*bump*
Configuring CUPS (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Configuring CUPS (Score:2)
Re:Configuring CUPS (Score:2)
Re:Configuring CUPS (Score:4, Insightful)
A) Not have to find all of the varied repositories for different kinds of software on their own; it should come with a huge trusted repository list, and potentially update that list on its own if the user requests it.
B) Not be stuck by physical dependancies. If a compiled version is not available that matches your setup, it should automatically download either a source version and compile it (and get the necessary libraries), or a standalone version.
C) If there is an error in the install of a package (regardless of the method the installation is attempting), it should try a lesser version of the same package.
Windows has a big advantage on Linux when it comes to installation because we have so many versions of the same libraries floating around. We need to fix this.
Re:Configuring CUPS (Score:3, Informative)
https://localhost:10000
You might be surprised at how much stuff you can do from there - like, pretty much everything.
It worked for me... (Score:2)
Re:It worked for me... (Score:2)
system-config-printer
Use it
Learn it
Live it
CUPS printer detection (Score:3, Interesting)
Makes me wish I had time to actually work on these things, even if I find out that this can't be done.
IIRC... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:IIRC... (Score:2)
LACKING!?!? (Score:5, Funny)
One more rant, whoever it was that was unimaginative enough to come up with the foomatic name should be flogged.
It has little to do with CUPS itself. (Score:5, Interesting)
Fedora's printer config dialog sucks -> Linux printing status: unfriendly.
Yast - Seconded (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yast - Seconded (Score:2)
The interface is easy, but felt very restrictive. BTW, I ended up having to reinstall the OS (archive mode, worked well without messing anything up) to get the printing to work.
Re:It has little to do with CUPS itself. (Score:2)
Same as setting up any hardware.
--
Evan
Re:It has little to do with CUPS itself. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It has little to do with CUPS itself. (Score:2)
To be honest it is Xerox flaw, with HP you get PPD files on CDs in separate directories. Also just today I've purchased Samsung LCP-500 which is cheap semi professional color laser printer. The printer came with CD and Linux drivers. So it is due to vendor to support drivers.
Look nobody will buy unsupported printer in order to use it with Linux - this is quite normal. Also nobody claims that every plastic-crappy-printer-bo
Re:It has little to do with CUPS itself. (Score:3, Funny)
"Oh yes, well, as soon as I heard I went straight round to fetch it, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually saying anything about it or anything."
"But the file was available."
"Available? I had to finagle my way into a non-advertised server to download it."
"That's our Linux Support Server."
"With Telnet."
"Ah, well, the HTTP interface had
Re:It has little to do with CUPS itself. (Score:2)
another story about graphics card support...
Re:It has little to do with CUPS itself. (Score:2)
Wonder why? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, so much for ESR tirades motivating the development of user-friendly software. Anyone else have any ideas?
Re:Wonder why? (Score:2)
After all, it *is* one of the much-touted advantages of FOSS that you actually can scratch your metaphorical itches instead of having to wait for the vendor to do it.
Re:Wonder why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't the idea that the community can do what people can't, or won't do for themselves.
Some people don't have time to do what would have to be done.
Re:Wonder why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course not. ESR raised alot of issues and even got some positive response from the CUPS developers. Good for him.
But the Ask Slashdot submitter shouldn't expect developers to fall all over themselves just because ESR says so.
Re:Wonder why? (Score:3, Insightful)
This line of thinking is only acccurate in a theoretical sense. Unfortunately, it assumes that all people are roughly equal in competence with regard to a given task. One of the
Re:Wonder why? (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah... try paying the developers. Nothing motivates people to do unpleasant things like money will (see: the porn industry and Fear Factor).
That's why the commercial software development model is superior in terms of responding to the desires of ordinary users.
Re:Wonder why? (Score:2)
Re:Wonder why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Even though Eric Raymond was talking about the RedHat CUPS tool, I'll bite (YHBT, etc etc.)
The webadmin tool (http://localhost:631) is not well thought out. You start off logged out, but there is no little 'logged in / logged out' indicator like 99.9% of commercial websites have. [tt]However, in the CUPS team's favor, most OSS drops the ball on providing useful user feedback like a login status indicator (see the many Wiki's out there that suffer from this.) But then, I wri
no common interface (Score:5, Interesting)
Such is the nature of the beast... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Such is the nature of the beast... (Score:3, Insightful)
... and "open source programmers" never get paid. Right.
--Bruce Fields
CUPS on FC4 test 2 (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
CUPS (Score:5, Informative)
If you are an end-user, it is implied that you should be using desktop tools to accomplish this.
Both Gnome and KDE offer very nifty printer configuration apps that will take care of setting up CUPS for you. Gnome uses gnome-cups-manager (run that from your terminal or create a launcher), while KDE uses kprinter (you can also run it from the terminal and create a shortcut).
It is also worth mentioning that when you hit print on Mozilla Firefox, you can hit "Properties" for the printer in the print dialog and change the "Print Command" line to KPrinter to let it handle the printing in a much less convoluted way.
Re:CUPS (Score:4, Insightful)
Amen to that. I'm partial to the KDEPrint system [kde.org], and wish that it was half as easy to configure network printers in Windows as it is through the nice KDE GUI.
For those who didn't catch that, let me repeat it: in my experience, it's much easier to configure printers (particular network servers) in KDE than it is in Windows. As far as I'm concerned, this particular problem is well solved.
Are you serious? (Score:3, Informative)
But easier then windows? I bought a printer, plugged it in and it worked. Never took the driver out of the box.
How is it easier then that? did Linus come to your house and put in on your desk for you?
Coincidentaly, I installed a network printer at the office. My desktop Win 2k machine just picked it up.
Opposite experience from ESR (Score:3, Informative)
I went downstairs to my GF's Powerbook running OSX 10.3.x and told it that I would like to add a network printer. It found the printer that I had created. I clicked "print a test page" and everything "just worked." I don't see how it could get much easier.
Re:Opposite experience from ESR (Score:5, Funny)
The KISS Principal (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the problems with FLOSS is that it tends to be written by hackers (which is also one of its biggest benefits, but I digress)...
Hackers want lots of options. They want to be able to configure FIFO settings for serial printers and flow controls, and all the technical nitty gritty.
Grandma doesn't know what the hell a flow control is. All she wants to do is a print a picture the grandkids sent her.
The biggest barrier to FLOSS usability is often overwhelming the user with too many options. A good GUI presents the most basic options you need to accomplish a task, and hides the rest where Grandma won't find it, but where someone who wants to change some deep, dark setting has the option of doing so.
IMHO, Mac OS X Gets It Right. Their configuration dialogs are quite simple, but you can always get under the hood if you need to. That sort of ease of use is what makes OS X a Unix that Grandma can use.
And if it takes messing about with obscure settings to get things to work, then the back end needs to be refined until the system works.
Complexity is at odds with usability, and in general FLOSS tends to be balanced more towards the former than the latter.
Re:The KISS Principal (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The KISS Principal (Score:4, Insightful)
system-config-printer? (Score:2)
The thing that pops into my mind is the question:
Why doesnt those who feel this is a real problem fix it?
DIY?
KDE control centre does a good job (Score:2)
How 'bout the book? (Score:5, Informative)
Not long ago, there was a Slashdot review [slashdot.org] of a certain book [oreilly.com], which included a chapter on CUPS that can be downloaded for free [oreilly.com] (can't beat that price!). It seems to demystify the entire process of administering CUPS.
Five cents, please...(that's about all my opinion is worth these days)
Re:How 'bout the book? (Score:2)
It is the same like you would say that Apache is not friendly because some distros GUI sucks... It is not the point a
Re:How 'bout the book? (Score:2)
Lucky you. Mine's only worth two.
Re:How 'bout the book? (Score:3, Insightful)
Please. (Score:3, Insightful)
What's so hard about clicking on "Manage Printers" and then "Add Printer"?
Among my recent linux converts, they described CUPS as being relatively hastle free, and superior to the oft-broken process under Windows.
Gave up on CUPS (Score:3, Informative)
After all was said and done, any printout I made printed about 90% of the page, and then it was garbage city. And as a general rule with messed-up printings, all garbage that prints out a form feed every few lines or so. So it's not one page of garbage characters, it's a stack of them.
Eventually I just gave up, and will be just using a Win98 box with sharing for all print jobs.
What's the problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
Needs to be as simple as windows printing. (Score:5, Insightful)
In windows setting up a printer is as easy as \\servername\ printersharename
On the server adding that printer to be available to clients is just a matter of knowing what port, or IP its on (which configures a "port" when you provide the IP during setup). This again is a minor job.
I've tried, several times to get CUPS working and ave found it the stupidest sub system in all of UNIX. There has got to be a better way, but I haven't found it yet, has anyone else?
I have been able to get everything I have ever needed working in Linux in the past simply bu reading the man pages and how-to's but neither seems to have the answers for CUPS.
My printer in my house is on a printer server box. Configuring printing should be trivial. Privide a printer type and an IP and GO.
Re:Needs to be as simple as windows printing. (Score:3, Informative)
All you have to do is - nothing at all! I can take a virgin PC, connect it to my network, boot with a Knoppix CD, start OpenOffice.org and all my printers are there and ready to use. No configuration, no drivers, no \\servername\printername. As soon as I do File=
Re:Needs to be as simple as windows printing. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll admit I screen my hardware (Score:2)
I don't know anything about fedora. I also have had trouble in the past with using my own ppd files. But I think the interface was just fine.
As for general printing problems? There are plenty. Just because your printer
Problems everywhere (Score:3, Insightful)
____
Printers are, generally, a bit of a pain in the ass. There are way too many proprietary drivers and driver styles, and I really don't see the need for it.
Why can't these manufacturers define a standardized, extensible interface format for their printers and end this madness once and for all?
Re:Problems everywhere (Score:2)
Yeah, but postscript's not open source. I think that Adobe charges royalties (who wouldn't?), so with the price of printers now being less than the cost of the replacement cartridges(!) people seem unwilling to use it in other than the higher end.
Re: (Score:2)
Complaining is easy (Score:2)
now, if he would implement a solution
not that i would care, dead tree format is clumsy
Obligatory (Score:2)
Autodetection (Score:3, Insightful)
It *knows* i have no jetdirect or network printer, that the printer is connected on lp0 and it correctly detects the model.
Why it needs to ask me how the printer is connected is beyond me. This can only confuse new users.
Why should there be "printer administration"? (Score:3, Insightful)
You ask an application to print something. At most, you should have to specify which printer. The system should have figured out by itself everything it needs to know about directly attached printers. Anything on the local network that offers printing should have already been recognized. Faraway printers may have to be specified in some way, but even there, you'd expect a directory system or search engine to do the heavy lifting. There should be no need for explicit "system administration".
That's how it should work. Yes, it's not easy to do it that way. Yes, there are some older printers that can't be automatically identified via their electrical interface. Yes, sometimes the system may have to find and download some format conversion program.
Most of Eric's comments are NOT about CUPS... (Score:3, Informative)
Regarding the CUPS web interface, there is actually a LOT of development happening for the new CUPS 1.2 release to make things work much more smoothly, ask the user less questions when they don't need to be asked, and move the web interface to a more task-oriented UI instead of the current function-oriented UI.
For example, in the new web interface the "add printer" button will list any printers that CUPS discovers automatically ("Epson Stylus RX300 on USB port") - you just click on "add listed printers" to add the printers, or "add printer manually" to add one manually. Similarly, printer sharing, remote administration, etc. are now check boxes on the administration page instead of going through the cupsd.conf file.
Anyways, good changes ARE coming for the native CUPS interfaces, and I only hope that the Linux distributors follow suit with their GUIs...
Mm... (Score:4, Interesting)
So long as you know about www.linuxprinting.org, you're set. The procedure via gui consists of: Connect with a web browser, add a new printer, give it a name, select a port (which admittedly can have some confusing options as many "ports" are available for a single, physical port), select a printer.
For bog-standard printers like HP Laserjet, you just select anything that looks HP-like until you can get to select your printer. For others (for example, my Samsung ML-4500 or inkjets etc.), download a PPD, install it in the right place beforehand and options will arise for that printer.
No, it's not 100% clear or simple but then not much in Linux ever is, but I have to say that CUPS is one of the easiest parts of my Linux setup. X, KDE and ALSA have given me ten times more problems. And once CUPS is up, so much uses it and detects it that you really have very few problems, KDE, Samba, etc.
Compared to the APSFilter (with all it's Ghostscript support) that I used to use for printer-servers prior to discovering CUPS it's a dream. I'd have to say that CUPS needs one or two minor tweaks to it's GUI, not much worse than that and even one or two lines of explanatory text or a web-link to Linux Printing's HOWTO would let it be used by even the simplest of Linux users.
I agree with E.R. (Score:3, Interesting)
Each time I make an attempt to tackle CUPS, I find that the easiest way to deal with configuring it is to delete that package and load LPRng. At least it's something that you can get working in a reasonable amount of time.
The point (Score:5, Insightful)
The user plugs in a printer. There is no step two. If there was no printer before, the printer is now the default. There is no need to tell the machine about it this, no GUI popping up, no config programs to run. If there was a previous default printer the user can right-click its icon representation in some control center to make it the default, otherwise it is just a choice in the print preview dialog.
Stop bitching that CUPS is good enough. Informing us that tool X does what you want it to do is of no worth whatsoever. That is simply taking the easy road. Open Source can, and will given enough time, do better. By failing to see the problems you are just hurting Open Source by your zealotry.
Whether some other operating system does it in some other way is completely irrelevant. The nature of Open Source is to iteratively approach a perfect state. There is no part too small or insignificant, or grand and important, that we can not improve it. Every single wording of every label is open to refinement, every padding issue of every widget open to tweaking to perfection. And when the system plain sucks we rip it out and do it again. The only constant factor in Open Source is change and improvement, 365 days a year 24 hours a day. The shop never closes, on Christmas day there is a million CVS checkins around the globe. That is what Open Source is all about. I put very real code where my mouth is, if your contribution to Open Source consists of "well, it works for me", SHUT THE FUCK UP, in your shortsightedness you hurt Open Source and I as a developer will rather have 5 guys pointing out flaws than you promoting the status quo.
Re:The point (Score:3, Funny)
And on Valentine's Day, there are a billion.
Re:Where did you get Windows from? Lets be better! (Score:3, Insightful)
Allow them to specify those things when they go to print a document, not when they plug in a printer.
The only thing that should happen when you plug in a printer is the computer gives you some sort of thumbs-up indication a printer was just plugged in, and everything's ready to go.
Re:A CUPS How-To (Score:2)
Re:Wow (Score:2)
Re:Hear no...see no...speak no... (Score:3, Funny)
Close our eyes, and pretend the problem doesn't exist.
You're a FreeBSD developer, aren't you?
Re:Hear no...see no...speak no... (Score:2)
Re:Windows no rose garden either (Score:2)
Re:Windows no rose garden either (Score:2, Insightful)
So there.
Re:Windows print config easy? (Score:3, Funny)
The same way that clicking "Start" is the intuitive and/or easy way to get to the "Shut Down" option...
...and War is Peace, and Freedom is Slavery, and so forth.
Hey, I didn't say it made SENSE...