Yes, CUPS is far more capable than the old Berkeley LPD spooler or LPRng. (disclaimer: I'm heavily involved with Gutenprint, and am responsible for nearly every dyesub printer added in the past few years, nearly all via reverse-engineering.) Printing is *complicated*, and there's no getting around that. The likes of AirPrint and IPP are a good thing but it only helps when the printer is natively network-enabled, as opposed to requiring a PC to act as an intermediary, or worse, requiring every printjob to go through "the cloud" in order to be properly rendered for the printer. To make things worse, many of these printers falsely advertise themselves as being "USB printer class" compatible when they are not, requiring some sort of custom protocol to successfully submit a printjob and query its status. No two of those are the same, and what Linux support there is tends to be derived via reverse-engineering. This isn't typically a problem with high-end or "business" printers, as they tend to be native PS or PDF anyway, supplying PPDs that describe everything, but rather the consumer-oriented junk that gets replaced every six months with another model. The weak link, as always, is manufacturer support. There is a now a standard rendering flow, with well-defined interfaces between each layer (eg PDF or PS in, color management, convert to printer raster format, passed to low-level backend), and applications are given feedback as to what settings are in use, what's allowed, and the current status of things. I usually manage to do some sort of voodoo that yields me a working printer, but I often have no idea what I did.Īs bad as things are now they are light-years better than things used to be.īack in the good-old-days, if you didn't have a postscript or "laserjet compatible" printer, you were pretty much SOL, with no standard way of expressing desired (or even allowable) printer configuration settings.ĬUPS changed that there's a common configuration interface, spool interface (no matter how the printer is attached), and job management interface. > Is it just me or do others find CUPS the most hostile piece of software to configure and troubleshoot? I dread setting up a printer on Linux. Making remote prints with it works, but I had to do some tricks for it to work on some machines here, as sometimes the printer wizard doesn't do the right thing to talk with the plugin on the remote host. Also, there's no ppd file for that exact model on the reverse-engineered driver. Ok, it is, in theory, possible to use a reverse-engineered driver, but then the scan function of the printer is lost. Also, it runs only on x86, with means that I cannot use any arm device as a printer server. Its support is really crap, as it requires a plugin from HP that needs to be updated every time a new release of hplip is updated. The other print is a Laser Jet printer M1132 with only USB port. I can scan/print via network on any machine (as this printer also have its own ethernet port). Works really smoth, and don't require any proprietary driver from HP. One of them is a jet printer with PCL/PS support. That very much depends on what printers you have. > I've found HP's drivers (hplip and the hpcups driver) to be quite excellent. Unfortunately the author of that driver seems to be unable to cooperate with distributions, so it's "interesting" to install as well and generally not used by default for these printers. If you don't like the idea of drivers downloading binaries from random websites, try the free reverse-engineered foo2zjs driver. Try setting up the printer while it's locally connected using USB, and see if that helps. The comment "Device URI is invalid/unknown" is generated by the download script, which gets confused by non-local printers. hplip needs to a binary-only library to support this and this library is missing (that's the -48 error). (To be fair: if you have a printer that's supported by the standard Postscript or PCL drivers, everything works wonderfully.)Ĭoncerning your specific example: You have ZjStream printer. HP is not the worst though, Brother's drivers are so bad I wrote my own. In fact, almost all Linux printing problems are caused by the generally piss-poor quality of third-party drivers. That problem is not caused by CUPS but by hplip, HP's printer driver.
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