I recently created a wireless print server with cups and samba on raspbian. I'm able to print from every device on my home network but I noticed a strange behaviour: when I print a postscript file directly from the raspberry pi lp works perfectly, while lpr prints a lot of sheets, the majority blank, some with random lines. Has someone experienced the same? Can someone give me or point me to a clear explanation about how gs, lp, lpr and cups interoperate?
Lp and lpr postscript printing behaviour
cupspostscriptprintingraspbian
Best Answer
CUPS is the printing system under Linux. In particular, it provides a server and clients. The
lp
andlpr
are two common commands to print files:lpr
is the BSD one, andlp
the System V one. There exist various implementations (more or less compatible with the original commands), but nowadays they should be CUPS clients. You should check that withdlocate
ordpkg -S
: if raspbian is like Debian,lp
should be provided bycups-client
andlpr
should be provided bycups-bsd
(both binary packages are from thecups
source package). AFAIK,gs
is unrelated on the client side.Your problem is quite strange since
lp
andlpr
should behave in the same way (if they are both the CUPS clients). To solve your problem, I suggest that you look atstrace
output to see if there are important differences. For instance, see what files under your home directory and under/etc
are read.