[wplug] lprng vs cups.

[Edward Walter]

At one point, in a past life, I deployed a linux print server to replace
an existing NT print server that was acting flaky.  I did samba
integration with automagic driver downloads etc.  The sticking point that
made me choose cups over lprng was that we had printers that weren't
natively supported by lprng.  The vendor provided a ppd (postscript
printer definition?) file which was trivially easy to use with CUPS.  I
tried to import the same file into lprng and gave up in frustration.

I believe that RedHat is also moving to CUPS as it's default printing
engine/server.  Cups is also supported on a wide variety of other
distributions and OSes including the BSDs and MacOS X.  Hope that helps.
-Edward Walter

> hey.
>
> i'm looking to make printing easier and better than before in my lab.
> this is the current setup we have:
>
> we have a central server with a print spool located on it. all of the
> workstations have rlpr installed and a file in /etc that looks like
> this:
>   <rlprrc>
>   hydra.pg: scribe21 scribe scribe2 quill scribe4 scribe8 scribe16
> </rlprrc>
>
>
> this works out well enough for me but there are a few things i would
> like for the rest of the people in the lab.
>
>    o integration into applications
>       ie goto file -> print the printers are located there in some
> clickish fashion. more appealing to people who don't want to type
> commands.
>    o take advantage of more of the features of the printer.
>       economy mode, different dpi, multiple pages per face.
>
> so i want something that will allow me to achieve these goals. i also
> don't want to have to muck around too much on the workstation (ie
> installing on the workstations is easily scriptable).
>
> both lprng and cups are integrated into the kde applications (anyone
> know about gnome?).  on usenet i read some stuff that suggested cups
> would be better for the second point above, but that it was more buggy
> than lprng.
>
> would anyone like to share their opinions of the two and suggest a
> method for installing/sharing print spools (perhaps via nis)?
>
> --
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