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Shared printer setup?

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curaga:
I was thinking of getting a printer and then sharing it in my network. Comments welcome.


The server would be cups + hplip. Will probably build custom versions to get rid of dbus, it's not a hard dep on either. Sadly appears can't get rid of python with hplip.

The clients would be as simple as possible - busybox lpr. The only configuration to do on the client would be to set the env var PRINTER to the ip of the server.


IMHO, having to install cups and/or drivers on the clients would be incredible waste of space compared to this setup. Anyone see any gotchas I probably have missed?

Juanito:
You'll most probably need ghostscript/ghostscript_common, but otherwise it looks like it should work.

hurricane:
I share a printer on my network, but each user does have their own driver installed. I didn't think it was that big of a deal, and it was easy to do it this way.

netnomad:
you can configure cups in the cups.conf
i guess that your users should be in the same group,
so all users can share the printers without any complicated configuration.
after changing the configuraton you should restart the cups-server,
to load the new settings.

curaga:
Haha, it took a while ;)

Anyway, now I have this thing set up just like I planned. TC with a dbus-less light cups, almost pythonless, acting as a print server. With all clients needing nothing more than busybox lpr. No drivers, nothing to configure. Just works.

I like that a setup this light was still possible to do.

Notes:
- cups-lpd is run by tcpsvd, as user lp
- do not buy a printer that needs the HP blob if you can avoid it, took me two weeks to work around the thing
- pdf printing failed by default. Had to manually build pdftops in the cups source and edit mime.convs to enable it.
- default cups.conf used, no access to the web interface from lan
- had to build GS too, due to a dbus dep

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