The doc­u­men­ta­tion of CUPS is not very good (CUPS client setup)

Yes­ter­day evening I did set­up a CUPS serv­er at home. It was on my TODO list since years. Before I just went down­stairs and con­nect­ed the print­er via USB to the laptop/netbook for print­ing (to pick­up the print­out I have to go there any­way). It is not the first time that I set­up the serv­er side of CUPS, but it was the first time that I want­ed to use the CUPS com­mand line util­i­ties instead of the FreeBSD/Solaris printspool­er and the native lpr/lp commands.

First I just had a look at some man-pages of the CUPS util­i­ties, in the hope to find some com­mand to tell that any print­ing should be done via a remote CUPS serv­er. As I did not find any­thing, I went to the doc­u­men­ta­tion page of CUPS to search there. To me this is some sim­ple con­fig part if you want to print from more than one machine, so I had a look at the “Get­ting Start­ed” part. This was a total fail­ure. I found noth­ing relat­ed to my prob­lem. After that I went to the “Man Pages” part to search for a com­mand which I may have over­looked. Again, a total fail­ure. The FAQ also does not con­tain any use­ful infor­ma­tion when you search for “client” or “remote”. In the end I stum­bled over the client.conf entry in the Ref­er­ences part. After I found this it was easy (and fast, I just added a line in client.conf with “Server­Name <serv­er>” and every­thing worked as I want­ed it to work).

The set­up in Win­dows XP to use the CUPS serv­er is easy, just add a net­work print­er via http://<server>:631/printers/<printer> and use the cor­rect print­er dri­ver for your print­er mod­el. Do not for­get to make the application/object-stream in the mime* con­fig files and allow remote print­ing in the serv­er. No, I do not want to inte­grate it into Sam­ba, the num­ber of Win­dows sys­tems is very lim­it­ed (2 Win­dows against 2 Unix machines with 14 light­weight vir­tu­al Unix machines), so I do not need this.