accessing a remote CUPS server

[Cristian Tibirna]

On Tuesday 15 September 2009, Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:

> Hmm, something like system-printer-configuration doesn’t seem to exist on
> Ubuntu/Kubuntu. 

It should. It was from there that KDE wanted to import it at some point. I'm 
not sure at what stage this import has gotten to (I'm rather removed from KDE 
development right now).

> But if you meant, I should configure the local CUPS server
> instead of KDE, I could also use the web frontend under
>  http://localhost:631, couldn’t I?

Yes, you can do that too.

> Do you mean, I should configure the local CUPS server to use another
>  server? This could solve my problem. However, I actually wanted to
>  configure KDE to use the remote CUPS server directly so that I could very
>  well remove the local CUPS server altogether.

If you want to use multiple remote servers, you have to use your local server 
in order to have it communicate with them and poll them.

For using one single remote server, you don't need a local server. You can 
just even edit by hand the /etc/cups/client.conf file and put there the server 
name you need.

> I’d really like to know whether the print system of KDE 4 can only contact
> localhost or whether it can contact CUPS servers on arbitrary hosts, as it
>  was the case with KDE 3.5. Surprisingly, noone seems to know the answer
>  (or doesn’t want to give it).

It is a dialog from Qt that provides the printing services to KDE4. I didn't 
look into that code, but I'm pretty sure that it acts like a cups client, 
using even the cups client library. Thus, yes, KDE4's printing service should 
very well contact remote servers. And yes, it does it on my machine (an 
openSUSE with KDE 4.3.1. You only need the right configuration in 
/etc/cups/client.conf, as I mentioned.


-- 
Cristian Tibirna
KDE developer .. tibirna at kde.org .. http://www.kde.org