[arch-general] Cups 1.6 printer discovery

[mike cloaked]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 11:33 AM, Mantas Mikulėnas <grawity at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 12:32 PM, Kevin Chadwick <ma1l1ists at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>> "Bonjour Support; Bonjour printer sharing and discovery is now also
>> supported using Avahi."
>>
>> Also supported?
>
> "Also supported" means "you can now use Avahi instead of Bonjour", as
> DNS-SD support in previous versions was limited to Mac OS X.
>
> The removal of CUPS Browsing is mentioned in
> <http://cyberelk.net/tim/2012/02/06/cups-1-6-changes-ahead/>. It makes
> sense, since DNS-SD is more efficient, and Apple already use it for a
> whole ton of other programs.
>
>> I can't see it affecting network printers using IPP in any case anyway.
>
> That's right, it only affects printer discovery.

I finally got my printer working - by setting the correct settings
into nsswitch.conf and running avahi-daemon I can see the printer -
though it turns out that the printer definition in the client machine
needs a proprietary ppd file (and proprietary raster file in the cups
filter directory) and all then works well - strangely although the
splix package works fine on Fedora - on arch the splix package fails
to support my printer so I guess the two packages are different.

Also I think that the old cups sharing meant that all the printing was
handled in the server machine - but now the printer also needs to be
defined in the client machine with its own drivers - which is  rather
different from the pre-1.6 behaviour - at least when the client is on
cups v1.6 and the server is cups 1.5

However at least I have shown that printer sharing is possible and
does work in cups 1.6 so I have an operational print facility again in
my arch laptop.

-- 
mike c