Setting up diverse printers to SuSE Enterprise 8

[Ronald Cogen]

I have to connect the following network printers served by a HP ML370 running SuSE Enterprise 8:
HP 4 plus (Netport pro)
Xerox N24 Hochleistungsdrucker (A3)
Xerox N17 (Netport pro)
Xerox LP4: Farblaser
The printers are connected to an HP 2626 Switch. The printers can be pinged and telneted, but that's about it at the moment.
What is the best way to go about this? The manual confuses me, especially about CUPS.

[Mark Grant]

If they can be pinged, they can probably be printed to, what exactly confuses you about CUPS. In theory, you'll only need to set up the URI which will be something like "socket://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:9100". Obviously, the ip address needs to be there in place of all those x's. Other than that, you only need to make sure you have the corect driver for the printer and the "gimp-print" drivers seem to produce the best results.

[Ronald Cogen]

Thank you Mark. Frankly, I'm not sure where to begin. And I'm not sure if CUPS is enough. What happens with LPRng, lpd, printcap, etc?

[Mark Grant]

When you install cups, it replaces all the common "lp" commands with it's own version. They are completely compatible so no applications should notice. It even creates an /etc/printcap file for you even though it doesn't need it.

It's an easy install. Install the thing, point your web browser at localhost:631 and click on things.

[Ronald Cogen]

Thanks Mark. I'll try it, but first on Saturay. I have other problems at the moment. Do I install CUPS from YAST?

[Mark Grant · Accepted solution]

Yes, it comes with the distribution so you can install it from Yast. Personally though, I always get it from "www.cups.org" and build it from source. This tends to be more robust but can get really annoying when trying to get the required version of ghostscript to compile. So, if you're not too confident about it, install it from Yast.

[Paul Cross_1]

I setup CUPS here for about 125 printers and found it a large, but not difficult project. the CUPS documentation is pretty good and CUPS itself is rock solid once it's set up. It can get complicated if you have multiple networks however. Finding ppd files is a bit more of a challenge (http://www.linuxprinting.org or dl the windows print driver, unzip it and somewhere in the archive will be a ppd file).
I would like to clarify that the 9100 port is for JetDirect printing. If you want to setup cups using IPP use port 631. Most modern printers support IPP and according to http://www.easysw.com (the authors of CUPS), the netport is supported.

Read all about it at http://www.cups.org.