Can I print to a remote cupsd without installing cupsd on the client?

Question

I have a networked printer, a cups server and several desktops all having the cups daemon running. This setup works but has an annoyance that if something won't print, the user has to check two print servers and that is not something that can be explained easily.

I have now (succesfully I thought) removed cupsd and only left cups-client on one desktop, allowing me perfectly to print to the remote printers from Firefox, but not from Evolution. I cannot see any printers in the Gnome system-panel.

Am I doing something wrong or is this expected behaviour and should I just keep cupsd installed on the desktops?

Answer 1

You need the cups package installed on all machines but only need to run it on one of them you designate as the print server.

I have a single Linux Print server named printsrv running cupsd with all the network printers defined with proper drivers/PPDs/etc. On the 100+ other Linux machines at my site I have turned off the cups service daemon. The only config for printing I do on them is to add one line to /etc/cups/client.conf which is

ServerName printsrv.mydomain.com

With that one line in /etc/cups/client.conf all my Linux boxes see every printer I define on printsrv. All GNOME based apps I have seen will show the full list of printers on printsrv. All printer management can be done from the printsrv machine as that is where all the jobs will spool and get hung up if a network printer is down.

Answer 2

Which distro are you using? Have you added your printer to /etc/cups/client.conf? It's possible that Evolution doesn't support printing from the client. I'm reasonably sure that custom printer frontends like Gnome's are designed around managing a local CUPS server. Most distros run the full CUPS server. Honestly, I would save yourself the headache and just keep CUPSd installed.

What's the output of lpstat -p?