Okay a combined status update for you today 🙂
So, the CUPS problem I had with the USB printer turned out being an error with the way cups was configured in Gentoo and somehow to the way CUPS tries to enforce security. To summarise, if the SystemGroup setting in the cups.conf file was set to “lp”, the backend runned as “lp:nobody” instead of “lp:lp”, so the “root:lp” device was unaccessible. Thanks to genstef, the new ebuild now creates an “lpadmin” group and use that as group for printers administration, while lp is left to be used to for accessing the device. Please note that if you configured lp in particular ways, you’d have to fix it at this point.
Now I can print safely from the Linux box; I’m also waiting for kdelibs to build to test the kdeprint patches needed to work with cups 1.2, so that finally we would be all set for upgrade, almost.
Also genstef added libpaper to the tree (Ubuntu version) so that people can set the default paper format they want to use (in my case A4).
I’ve already marked the ebuild ~x86-fbsd so that Gentoo/FreeBSD users can be safe.
Still, there are problems with using Gentoo/FreeBSD as printing server, although it works fine with a networked printer, right now the devices has no permissions set at all. This is a problem because FreeBSD to set the permissions uses a series of scripts that are run by rc, and by devd.
Using the same scripts would probably be possible, but I wouldn’t suggest that, as we have a structure quite different, so… well… I hope someone will have time to work on a gentoo-bsd-devfs scriptset 🙂
