Chess Griffin: March 2010 Archives

I've set up CUPS printing before in just about every Unix-ish operating system I've run for any length of time (Debian, Ubuntu, OpenBSD).

Maybe not so curiously, I've always found that dealing with CUPS directly through the Web browser at http://localhost:631 is easier than with any GUIs that ship with a given distro or project.

Not that FreeBSD or OpenBSD have such a thing. You have to do a lot yourself, and through that process you learn quite a bit about how CUPS and networked printers work.

OpenBSD provided excellent instructions, I recall, as does FreeBSD, where I was pleasantly surprised to find that my friend Chess Griffin is responsible for the documentation. Thanks go to him and the many others who make the FreeBSD Handbook, FAQ and the system's comprehensive man pages the great resources they continue to be.

Chess, whose now-ended Linux Reality podcast was a great inspiration to me, has been using both FreeBSD and OpenBSD extensively over the past long while, and his recent e-mails to me have encouraged me to continue running FreeBSD when I might have otherwise given up due to my constant impatience when things don't immediately work as I think they should.

Back to CUPS: It's always dicey. I used old notes I took the last time I set up CUPS (in Debian Lenny) to get the path to my network printer just right.

The BSDs don't tend to install a lot of drivers, which is a good thing because it's easy enough to go to the drivers area of CUPS.org and grab only what you need.

As in OpenBSD, there are maybe a half-dozen things that you need to do configuration-wise to get CUPS running in FreeBSD (and they're all in the Handbook).