[TriLUG] setting up cups

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

I have installed cups feeding two network printers (HP 
Laser Jet with network card and HP Inkjet parallel on a 
DirectJet box - neither of these are postscript).

I can print the test page on both printers from the cups 
admin page. I can also print from firefox using ^P (where 
the two printers appear in the menu - I have no idea how 
they got there).

What I can't do is

lp -d printer_name /etc/hosts

where printer_name is the printer name in the 
cups admin/printer pages.

The cups admin page shows the job is

"pending since " (date/time)

and no lights blink on the printer etc.

Google and google groups aren't helpful here.



I have foomatic-rip and foomatic-gswrapper installed
and a ppd file for each printer. On the admin page, the 
inkjet is a Gimp-print, while the other is RAW.
>From the LinuxPrinting.org CUPS QuickStart page I cannot 
figure out if I need to install any other foomatic files.

It's not clear to me how cups works. cupsd appears to be a 
webserver that allows you to write config files. I had 
expected that cups would be a wrapper around my regular lpd 
spooler. However there was no lpd installed with cups and 
nothing listening on port 515 when cupsd is running. 
Presumably all communication is via the cupsd port 631.

What I would like is to have this machine be a spooler and 
for the other machines on the network to print to the 
spooler rather than directly to the printer.

On these other print client machines do I need cups 
installed too? With the printers shared on the server cups 
machine, I set up cups on a second machine and reproduced 
the above tests with the network printers, and then looked 
to see if I could find the same printers shared from the 
cups server machine - I didn't really know what to do and 
didn't find any new printers. Since the server machine 
presumably would accept connections from cups client using 
ipp, I told the client to print to ipp://machine_name/ipp 
and then ipp://machine_name/ipp/cups_printer_name without 
success.

Rather than going on further, can anyone straighten me out 
with these pieces?

Thanks Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!