The nightmarish problem of installing a printer

[David Brodbeck]

On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 11:36 AM, Peter A. Giessel <pgiessel at mac.com> wrote:
> The question you are missing is *HOW* does MacOS X print to all these
> "cheap printers"?
>
> Lets take a couple of screen captures from Mac OS X.6 (Apple's latest
> released
> OS) with all current updates installed:
> http://giessel.org/pictures/OSX_printers1.png
> http://giessel.org/pictures/OSX_printers2.png
>
> Hmm, CUPS, and Gutenprint....  Are these methods available for FreeBSD?

In some cases, yes.  In other cases, where the manufacturer is
supplying an OS X driver that doesn't come with CUPS/Gutenprint, the
additional driver bits may not be FreeBSD-compatible.

I may be the only person here who actually likes CUPS.  Yes, it's
complicated from a software standpoint, but configuring it is much
less opaque.  Printers really are complicated, so having a GUI to help
set them up is nice.  I remember having to manually write and debug
filter scripts and edit /etc/printcap by hand, and I'm quite glad
those days are over.