On Fri, Sep 03, 2004 at 05:26:53PM -0400, Keith Wright wrote:
From: "Son Nguyen" <snguyen@hotmail.com>
I would recommend not using LPRng. It is too old.
As an old codger in training, I take that personally. You remind me of Perlis's comment on Algol60: Not perfect, but a big improvement over its successors.
As a young whippersnapper out of training... "Heh, reminds me of the last time I ran into Algol60... Er, wait, no it doesn't."
I don't even know what LPRng is, I suppose it's the New-Gnu version of the ancient bin/lpr program, from back in the days when programs were more prized for working than for having a Web interface.
'Course we'll skip the fact that the reason things were prized for working back then was that the majority didn't... And the web interfaces are generally a sign of civilization moving from the 'How can we eat?' stage past the 'Why do we eat?' and straight to the 'Where shall we have lunch?' stage... (Did I mention that LPRng was started in 1986 and hit widespread use in '88 or so? (At least according to the LPRng website)) <SNIP>
I can print from the printer/Linux machine, but when I tried to use the much-touted CUPS web-based set-up to connect to the printer from another Linux machine, it went totaly wonky. Certain buttons sent the browser in an apparent infinite loop. (By Turing, you can never be sure, but I waited long with no action) Sometimes it would take me to some crazy random place in the Internet, to pictures of buildings that had the same name as my server machine, as though some mad programmer had rewritten bin/hostname to search Google for its name.
You had some misconfiguration going on there probably... Your web browser had its auto-magical lookup functionality turned on and went looking for what you specified when it couldn't connect to the address you specified. <SNIP>
You can configure it via console, applet, or even web.
Not me, maybe you can.
Honestly, CUPS is not that hard to configure and use these days. There was a period of history where it was pretty difficult to set up correctly but it has been pretty solid for the last couple of years. And, even in the difficult years, it offered a level of functionality not readily available with the rest of tools in play at the time.
Fedora and Redhat has gone that route and I believe that others have too. It is much better than LPRng can every be.
Oh, I suppose, but much better can you make something that does what I used to with "cat scratch.ps >/dev/lp0"?
-- Keith
You mean, can I make it print gibberish on my non-PS PCL printer? But if that is all you need, then why bother with even old school lpr? On the other hand, if you want conversion to something your printer (whichever one you pick) will actually print, remote printing, printer pools, print job scheduling, and many other modern pieces of functionality... CUPS is probably something you want to look into... And I'd recommend it to the original poster. Frank (Typos and general icky-ness of the email I apologize for, had to recreate it from a bounce message as I discovered a bit of misconfiguration on my recently moved email server...)