On Sat, Jun 13, 2015 at 10:22:29AM -0500, Nate Bargmann wrote:
> * On 2015 13 Jun 08:08 -0500, LM wrote:
> > Laurent Bercot wrote:

> > It would be great if Devuan became the Linux distribution that offered
> > its users alternatives to more commonly used, often bloated software.
> > It would certainly make a great base distribution for other
> > derivatives if it did. Most Linux distributions I've run across so
> > far try to limit ones choices and make you follow their philosophy and
> > way of doing things. Personally, the systems that work the best for
> > me are the ones that don't try to lock you into doing things a
> > specific way and let you do what you want.
>
> This, exactly this. Thank you, Laura, you have penned in your last
> sentence exactly what my philosophy has been ever since Windows 95 was
> dumped on the scene and I went to Slackware to maintain the freedom I
> had known with MS-DOS. I think I have gotten lax in the intervening
> years (something about aging and wanting to divert my energies into
> other areas) and accepted these new monoliths/monocultures for the ease
> they provided. Over the past year I have had a rude awakening and am
> generally striving toward minimalism these days.
>
> I would dearly love to dump CUPS in favor of something comprehensible
> that would feed my HL-5240 compatible PS or PCL.

What's convenient about Cups is that it knows what printer driver to use.

What used to be convenient before Cups is that I could just write a
program that created a postscript file and send it to my printer using
a command like lpr, which knew that the printer was attached through
the parallel port.

I liked it back then. I could write actual postsript programs that
computed diagrams.

I have no idea what to do now. As far as I know, everything is
intercepted and rerouted. I'm not even sure if my laptop is talking to
the printer or to my wife's Apple laptop, which also runs CUPS.

CUPS used to e usable. But now?

I tried to print a jpeg image a while ago. I used a browser. I had a
choice between one mode thta I think was one screen pixel per printer
pixel -- useless, and 'fit to page', which seemed to think my
standard 8.5 x 11 page was twice as big, so I oonly got a quarter of
the image.

I think that Brother is one of the companies that advertises actual
Unix support, and that my printer an HL-3170CDW, at least, accepts a
variety of networked protocols, including some that originated in Unix.
But I don't know how to access them without CUPS.

There must be a way.

-- hendrik