Emulate legacy printer drivers for CUPS with QEMU

Re:Emulate legacy printer drivers for CUPS with QEMU by asveikau on Friday May 29, 2020 @10:53AM (#23350595)

I run lpd on a raspberry pi to share my printer. I used to share it to Windows hosts with samba but then I realized Windows supports lpd printers. (As does Mac and anything Unix-like.)

I am probably 20 years late in saying this, but I honestly don't know why cups is a thing. lpd works fine and has always struck me as simpler. It's smaller with fewer dependencies. This config is way more complicated than mine. Any time people talk about Unix printing they always assume you mean cups.

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Re:Emulate legacy printer drivers for CUPS with QEMU by kstrauser on Friday May 29, 2020 @05:34PM (#23355815)

LPD was awesome for sending a file, as-is, to a pre-configured printer. CUPS is awesome for changing things on the fly, like color vs. black-and-white or two-sided printing, or for giving clients enough information about the printer that they can automatically configure the correct driver.

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Re:Emulate legacy printer drivers for CUPS with QEMU by hedora on Friday May 29, 2020 @11:23AM (#23351018)

I don’t think LPD supported auto discovery or printer-specific configuration dialogs.

Cups is a bit too complicated for my taste though. Some settings live in the print dialog, others at localhost:631 (which password does it want, again?), and some are only accessible in /etc.

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Re:Emulate legacy printer drivers for CUPS with QEMU by bluGill on Friday May 29, 2020 @01:59PM (#23353312)

If you only have one printer CUPS doesn't do much. If you have hundreds of printers it starts to make sense.

Though they system we have at work where you print and then go to whatever printer and sign in makes more sense. The printout isn't there when you arrive, but at least it isn't on some printer in a different city.

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