Stupid Broken CUPS. Stupid Broken Printing Support.

Wednesday, June 01, 2005, at 05:46PM

By Eric Richardson

Here's why I absolutely despise printer tools in Linux. I open up the gnome-cups-manager, click the print test page button, and then try to pause the job. The GUI freezes and here's the message I get on the terminal:

** (gnome-cups-manager:29261): WARNING **: FOOBAR

Right. Like I'm supposed to know what that means. Not even Google has seen that error before.

There was a Slashdot thread not too long ago about printing and all these posts were saying "I don't know what they're complaining about. The Linux tools work perfectly with my network postscript printer." DUH! I'd love to be dealing with something simple and easy like that, but instead -- back here in the real world of the home desktop -- we have things like little Epson Stylus Colors. They don't speak postscript, and they certainly don't have a network interface.

Eric Richardson lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he works on payments infrastructure for Cash App.

Past lives involved streaming audio for Southern California Public Radio, running a hyperlocal news site for Downtown Los Angeles, working on custom mapping code, and writing Perl at the Jet Propulsion Labratory.

Previously on this date...

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