On Sat, Nov 10, 2007 at 04:30:51AM +0000, Jacob Meuser wrote: > On Fri, Nov 09, 2007 at 07:15:11PM -0700, Predrag Punosevac wrote: > > Any strong opinion on LPD vs LPRng vs CUPS issue? I am not a > > professional system administrator and there is way too much Linux and > > CUPS around me for my taste. I want to hear from the serious people what > > are the benefits of one system over the another. > > lpd - part of the base system. lightweight and very reliable. > > CUPS - relatively easy set up and ability to tweak options "on the > fly". > > lprng - never used it.
On OpenBSD, I've never used anything but lpd with a text-mode dot-matrix printer (no print filters). On Debian, I've used lpd (they use OpenBSD's), LPRng, but never CUPS. On Debian, you can use CUPS' foomatic-printfilters to get CUPS' printfilters without installing the whole CUPS infrastructure (to save disk space). I've used foomatic-printfilters with LPRng and straight lpd. I don't like the CUPS way, it seems like overkill to me. Then again, if your printer driver isn't in the standard gs then you may need a different gs. On debian, where everything is broken up in packages, you can get the gs-esp from CUPS and use it as a drop-in replacement for gs-gpl with lpd/apsfilter. It really is a piece-together thing unless you bow to CUPS and take the whole lot. The difference between lpd and LPRng is one of access control. Having the fine-grained access control comes at the price of more difficult setup (more docs to read). I also haven't seen any updates to it for a few years so I wonder about any security support. Once you get your printer setup to take a ps file, it will be able to take anything else once its converted to ps. Most browsers, for example, do this. Doug.
