In http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html ESR describes a number of problems he had using r-c-p in Fedora Core 1. In the corresponding SlashDot article http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/27/0043250&mode=thread several people confirmed that they had similar problems with r-c-p. I also have to agree - r-c-p is not very intuitive and certain things, _especially_ configuring several Fedora machines to access a printer attached to one of them should be much easier to do. Can some of ESR problems with r-c-p be addressed and some of his suggestions implemented?
Ideas to make it better: o Put a 'Sharing...' button on the edit dialog, to bring up the sharing dialog o Remove 'CUPS' as an option for queue type, or else put text on that screen saying 'this probably isn't what you want -- instead make sure that browsing is working by ...' o Default the 'Automatically find remote queues' check-button to on o Make queue list window indicate whether each queue is shared or private Others?
'Sharing' as in, using Samba to share the printer? The simple way would be to create a raw queue and share that (Windows users get to use vendor-supplied print drivers); would be nice to have sys-conf-print to ask for the vendor CD and copy the files from it. Otherwise, if CUPS' postscript driver is to be installed on the Windows clients, give the option to download and install it automatically (using cupsaddsmb). Unfortunately it's developed using Windows Driver SDK and can't be redistributed, but the print admin should be given the option to point sys-conf-print at another location (on CD, on a network share etc.) Caveat on using Samba raw print queue sharing: recent Winprinters might require each Windows user to be a print admin in order to print. Silly consumer items not meant for multi-user operations, but that's what a lot of users have.
No, nothing to do with samba at all.
o Default the 'Automatically find remote queues' check-button to on This point is already done actually, and in fact should have been the case since CUPS browsing was added to the config tool. I guess the real problem is the firewall rules (see bug #90946).
o Put a 'Sharing...' button on the edit dialog, to bring up the sharing dialog This point is added in system-config-printer-0.6.96-1.
o Make queue list window indicate whether each queue is shared or private This point is added in system-config-printer-0.6.98-1.