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CUPS 1.2, problems and impressions

So, today I started looking at CUPS 1.2 to add the needed patches to KDE, as I was asked by genstef.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that well for me, actually it doesn’t work at all. Ignoring some problems with multilib-strict that might be better handled by following upstream on this, my USB printer doesn’t seem to work.

I’ve submitted a bug to upstream and I’m now waiting for them to find the cause and a solution.

Right now, I won’t suggest to anybody to use that version of cups, considering this problem that might hit others, too. I’ll anyway hope to get the proper KDE patches merged as soon as I can print with my printer.

But a part the problems, I got a really good impression on CUPS 1.2, the configuration file is finally human readable (no more crufted Apache-like configuration file long entire pages), the Web interface is really improved, more friendly and better looking.

One of the things I really loved of the new CUPS is the administration interface, with the list of identified USB printers and a button to add them directly.
Not bad at all, although the drivers selection might be better, rightnow it moves you directly on the brand of printer you have, but it fails to recognise my Kyocera Mita as what it is and brings me to “Kyocera” page (where my model isn’t found obviously).

I hope this will really improve the support for printing in Linux. Already the usage of CUPS by Apple in Mac OSX gave us better support for printers as many vendors started to provide PPDs for CUPS to work (this is the case of Kyocera Mita, too), now if the interface becomes also more friendly for the basic user, it’s a big leap forward.

Myself, I love not having to change anything but enabling browsing to have my laptop to print on the amd64 station, both on Linux and OSX.

++ for CUPS 🙂

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