Why didn't Dapper fix its CUPS printing problems??

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Why didn't Dapper fix its CUPS printing problems??
by ex-suse on Thursday 01/Jun/2006, @08:40

I just installed Kubuntu Dapper (albeit it was from the RC1 iso image), and I dist-upgraded to the newest packages.

But I can't print to our company's CUPS 1.1 print server!

First of all, kprinter does not even see the shared printers offered from this CUPS box. Some very paranoid Canonical packages seemed to have disabled everything that makes CUPS user friendly (CUPS browsing, CUPS administration via the web interface); they seem to have gone as far as even disabling printing to a 1.1.x CUPS server altogether! Boy, that suxxxx...

Second, even if I force my kprinter to connect to the remote CUPS server, it does not print, but it gives me the error message "(400) -- Bad Request". (Note, I know quite a bit about CUPS, and it works fine with a Kubuntu Breezy client!).

Third, they seem to be clueless as far as the benefits of the new cool SNMP backend goes: they have disabled it altogether. Which means: no auto-discovery of network printers in one's own neighbourhood when installing a new queue, no (semi-)automatic driver selection for users! Are we going to see another case of that?

To me it looks like none of the problems which Kurt Pfeifle outlined in his blog 2 months ago have been fixed:

######## . . . http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1899 . . . ########

How should Linux ever get ready for the desktop if supposedly user friendly distros do unexplainable things like that?

We all remember the rant of ESR, which he (wrongly) directed towards CUPS developers, when he was unable to configure his home printer because the RedHat printer config tool did mess up what CUPS itself would have done just fine... Is this another opportunity to flame Mike Sweet and the CUPS.org folks, just because their marvellous work gets spoiled by overshooting distro "experts" who make Linux unusably secure and safe??

Related Links

·   Articles on KDE in Linux Distributions
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Re: Why didn't Dapper fix its CUPS printing problems??
by Gonzalo on Thursday 01/Jun/2006, @10:05

If it makes you feel better, Suse has a pretty strange way of understanding security vis-a-vis network printing via CUPS.

As you point out, lots of the most useful CUPS features are either removed, disabled in such a way that it takes a good chuck of time to re-enable them or just broken, although I believe it is slightly better than Kubuntu in this respect, which I remain unable to make it see my CUPS enabled network printer.

In Suse, although the CUPS autodiscovery didn't work, the printer prints after I give it the full URL of the CUPS printer.

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Re: Why didn't Dapper fix its CUPS printing proble
by Elijah Lofgren on Thursday 01/Jun/2006, @12:40

I found this in the KDE 3.5.3 changelog:
http://www.kde.org/announcements/changelogs/changelog3_5_2to3_5_3.php
"KDEPrint: Fix usage of private methods in CUPS which broke KDEPrint with CUPS 1.2 (bug #124157)"

If you haven't, I would try upgrading to KDE 3.5.3 (Kubuntu 6.04 comes with 3.5.2).
More info here: http://kubuntu.org/announcements/kde-353.php

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Re: Why didn't Dapper fix its CUPS printing proble
by ex-suse on Thursday 01/Jun/2006, @14:07

Thanks for trying to console me with your kind words, Elijah!

But alas!, KDEPrint's problems are of a different nature. (Also, Kurt deals with these in a different blog entry: http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1901 )

What my griping here is about, is that...

a) ...commandline printing does not work from Dapper to a CUPS-1.1.x server, it gives "Bad request" errors

b) ...the default CUPS web interface features are deliberately crippled on Dapper, supposedly for the sake of better "security"

c) ...the changes are not sufficiently documented, users are left without info how to fix it

d) ...if users turn to the "official" CUPS documentation, they are screwed, because that documentation does not match with what Canonical/Ubuntu/Dapper ships

e) ...the new snmp backend of CUPS that implements one of the OSDL Desktop Printing Summit decisions for easier autoconfiguration of printers is simply ignored

All of these are not fixed by any KDE upgrade.

What I did not yet say is that I really take issues with that type of super-smart *packagers* who try to decide these things on behalf of me, and in contrast to what the CUPS *developers* recommend as defaults, but who on the other hand seem to lack the smarts of shipping a CUPS 1.2.1 version (as was released 10 days ago) with more than 30 new bug fixes over 1.2.0 (shipping today in Dapper)...

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Re: Why didn't Dapper fix its CUPS printing proble
by Sunny Sachanandani on Saturday 03/Jun/2006, @19:14

Well file a bug report then (after of course updating all packages). They would probably be delighted to fix it in the next release (Edgy Eft : 6.10).

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Re: Why didn't Dapper fix its CUPS printing proble
by hbc on Thursday 01/Jun/2006, @16:03

Agreed, this is something that could have been done better. As a non-cups expert it took me about an hour to figure out how to turn the browsing on and to print on my old ubuntu box (with self compiled kde) from my new kubuntu dapper box. Reminded me of all the fun of the old days.

The details on how to turn the browsing on was available in the ubuntu forums and I think it is a minor point for what is a very good distibution.

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Re: Why didn't Dapper fix its CUPS printing proble
by ivoks on Sunday 04/Jun/2006, @20:49

Browsing in CLI/KDE/GNOME/whatever can be enabled with one command:

sudo /usr/share/cups/enable_browsing 1

Sharing you printers in CLI/KDE/GNOME/whatever can also be enabled with one command:

sudo /usr/share/cups/enable_sharing 1

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Re: Why didn't Dapper fix its CUPS printing proble
by Thore on Sunday 13/Aug/2006, @14:05

Thank you su much for posting this here!
Thank you thank you thank you.
Now I can get some sleep.

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Re: Why didn't Dapper fix its CUPS printing proble
by ivoks on Sunday 04/Jun/2006, @20:57

But the thing with CUPS1.2 is that browsing/printing with older 1.1 CUPSes really *is* broken in CUPS, not by Ubuntu. Take a look at CUPS1.2.1 changelog:

http://www.cups.org/relnotes.php

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Re: Why didn't Dapper fix its CUPS printing proble
by ivoks on Sunday 04/Jun/2006, @21:06

BTW, no one is flaming Mike. Bugs do happen and bugs get fixed. This is how (opensource) software works.

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Re: Why didn't Dapper fix its CUPS printing proble
by Martin Owens on Tuesday 08/Aug/2006, @07:34

You can switch on CUPS browsing from the GUI in Ubuntu (although not sure about Kubuntu as always is second class)

I found Ubuntus support in printers to be far better than any other distro, although a little confusing because all my FC4 friends had IPP Browsing by default.

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