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Is LPRng Project Still Alive? 46

Posted by Cliff from the on-the-morphine-drip dept.
deeptrout asks: "The LPRng distribution hasn't been updated since mid-2004, the LPRng project website hasn't been updated since late 2004, and the LPRng mailing list has been dead since the April of 2005. What's going on? Is the project unofficially dead? Has anyone heard any news from Patric Powell, the author of LPRng? It'd be a shame if that is true. I really like LPRng's simple and yet robust reimplementation of the LPD model that allows to keep the configuration for an entire site with hundreds of hosts and dozens of printers in a fairly simple text file. What are we supposed to do now? Switch to CUPS? Something else?"
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Is LPRng Project Still Alive? More

Is LPRng Project Still Alive?

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  • Just wondering. Surviving members of a project generally have a better idea than the community at large.

  • noooaaa (Score:4, Funny)

    by shaitand ( 626655 ) on Tuesday January 10, 2006 @09:47PM (#14442429) Journal
    "What are we supposed to do now? Switch to CUPS?"

    Simply because it has been the de facto standard for a decade? Of course not.

    • Cups isn't perfect and it certainly has not been any kind of defacto standard for a decade.

      • Re:noooaaa (Score:3, Insightful)

        by shaitand ( 626655 )
        Nobody claimed cups was perfect. It does succeed in acomplishing everything of merit that LPRng does however. As for it being the De Facto standard, I will not argue the point. After all, modern distributions argue the point for me.
        • After all, modern distributions argue the point for me. The objection does not appear to be to "standard" as much as to "decade".

          If I go dig out my RedHat or Slackware disks from '96, will I find CUPS on them? I don't remember having CUPS on them. I remember both LPRng and CUPS coming along after that. (But my memory may be fading with advanced age. :) )

      • Re:noooaaa (Score:5, Interesting)

        by golgotha007 ( 62687 ) on Wednesday January 11, 2006 @05:37AM (#14444339)
        Perhaps someone could point out something that I'm missing, but I've been trying to use CUPS for years now with very little success.

        The main problem is that shared printers randomly appear and disappear from the configuration. CUPS does not allow one to statically configure anything (very bad). One option I've found is to hardwire the config files with the exact parameters that I want, then make the files unwritable.

        I'm tired of clients calling me saying their shared printer has "disappeared". My solution? Install LPRng on all these customer configurations. Since installing LPRng, I've never had a single call about printer sharing.
        • I have never seen this. (Unless you allowed admin access to the web interface?) Hundreds of printers and drivers have worked fine for years.

          If you never get calls from users upset about network printing then your users must be scientists, or they're not network printing at all.

          LPR must go, (for the transmission of critical data) the same way telnet and FTP did. And at least THEY had authentication...

        • Re:noooaaa (Score:3, Informative)

          by printman ( 54032 )
          Actually, you *can* configure things statically with CUPS - all local printers work this way, and you can add remote printers (lpadmin -p remotename -E -v ipp://remoteserver/printers/remotename) the same way. It is just that *normally* you can let CUPS figure out what printers and servers are on your network for you...

    • Simply because it has been the de facto standard for a decade?

      A decade? That interesting since CUPS 1.0 didn't ship until late 1999 [slashdot.org]. That's only a little over five years since the 1.0 release. Not to mention that distros weren't in a hurry to make it part of their default installs. The first distro to support CUPS out of the box was Mandrake 9.1, IIRC, and that didn't ship until early 2003.

      • I believe CUPS was present in Red Hat 8.0 (September 2002) and the default printing system in RH9 (March 2003), which would make it roughly contemporary with Mandrake 9.1 (I don't remember which came out first).

        But out-of-the-box CUPS definitely extends further back than that: Mac OS X has used CUPS as the basis for its print services since Jaguar (10.2), which was released in August 2002.
      • My first install of Mandrake was Fall 2001 (Mandrake 7.1-7.2?), and it shipped with CUPS. Even better, Postfix was the default mail server, and not Sendmail.
  • > Switch to CUPS? Something else?

    Why? Has a bug been discovered?

  • Well, Gee! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Saeed al-Sahaf ( 665390 ) on Tuesday January 10, 2006 @10:35PM (#14442706) Homepage
    The LPRng distribution hasn't been updated since mid-2004, the LPRng project website hasn't been updated since late 2004, and the LPRng mailing list has been dead since the April of 2005. What's going on?

    Sounds like it's dead. What's your take?

  • Well, I switched... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by emag ( 4640 ) <slashdot@nosPAm.gurski.org> on Tuesday January 10, 2006 @11:26PM (#14442989) Homepage
    I lived in fear of each LPRng upgrade potentially breaking working printing functionality, and got tired of choosing a print filter package, only to have it disappear in upgrades to my distro. Then there was the fun when I was on the road, and needed to print at a client site (at least, when hooked to their network...), and needing to figure out the next magical incantaion. And I never really liked the config file for lpr anyway. Then I wanted to get photo printing working easily.

    So, coupled with needing to look into it for my then-current job anyway, since there was a requirement of "no unencrypted traffic" when something could be considered "privileged", as some print jobs to the network printers could be (don't ask, it wasn't physical so much as potential sniffers on the network), I finally looked into CUPS. I decided to convert the least-critical machine on my home network to CUPS under the belief that I could always switch back by copying over a working config. You know what? That same night, I converted all the other *nix machines at home. It was that nice, that easy, that painless. Aside from CUPS already knowing about all my printers, sitting off on a stand-alone 3-port print server, it also was able to make better use of their features.

    So, I'm now a happy CUPS user, and even had an easier time last week getting an HP LaserJet 1320 working on my *nix boxes (both simplex and duplex, draft, medium, and high qualities) than I did even getting the drivers and one printer instance onto my gf's XP SP2 laptop. (After the first, I just tarred up the modified files from /etc/cups, and scped and untarred on the remaining machines, restarting the CUPS daemon, though I don't know if that was strictly necessary)

    If you like LPRng, and it works for you, stick with it. For my money, I'm much happier with CUPS. And as a bonus, with all the print filters for a lot of common formats already there, I don't need to go through different steps to print PDFs, graphics, etc, I just lpr them.
    • What printers are you using? CUPS has porked my hinder with almost every upgrade (*) I've done, and sometimes mysteriously stops working and won't work again until I purge the configuration and reconfigure it.

      (debian/unstable, which may be my problem.)
      • I've been using an Epson Stylus Color 850, an Epson Stylus Photo R300, and an HP LaserJet 1320. The 1320 actually caused the retirement of the 850, as it was bought when I finally got annoyed at various issues I've been having with the 850 (carts drying out, cleaning cycles not clearing the nozzles sufficently, the nice long set of calisthenics it would go through before it would print, hating manual duplexing, and a general feeling of dissatisfaction with inkjets for things I didn't want smearing), and I'

  • Oh no, it's still going strong! (Score:3, Funny)

    by clambake ( 37702 ) on Tuesday January 10, 2006 @11:55PM (#14443128) Homepage
    Turns out there is a small problem with DNF compatibility holding things up. Supposedly once that is fixed it'll be released the next day.
  • whats so bad about CUPS?

    sure, I've never had large installs of it (max 10 printers and 100 staff). But it has an almost perfect record ime
  • I think the real problem here is a lack of GGPS with a LDN. I can't even begin to understand what they were thinking when they made this change. It is completely impossible to follow a GST when the DOK isn't present. What I really think we need is more clarity in the RTY. When you omit the meaning of an RTY the result is something that is completely incomprehnsivle to the user. I think this should be a lesson to all.
    • To any of the moderates who didn't catch it, this is a subtle (or not to subtle) attempt to suggest that future summaries try and use less obscure lingo. It is irritating to try and pick through a pile of acronyms to figure out what in the hell is being talked about. It is as simple as DYA (defining your acronyms) to bring a little sense to a summary. You could even throw in one extra sentence describing the project you are discussing so that people who might have some interest yet are not yet in the kno
  • A mature project SHOULD be dead, since there is nothing more to do. Only a horribly bad idea with a poor basic implementation will need perpetual large scale maintainance. If it works it works, who cares if it's dead?

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