I recall a long and spirited discussiio here a while ago about how
easy and simple it is to do printing, and that CUPS is a bloated
incomprehensible system that just makes it all complicated, I decided
test this by setting up my devuan system to talk to my networked
printer. With or without CUPS.

I've discovered I'm completely clueless on the matter. There must be
something simple I'm missing.


CUPS appears to have been installed when I installed devuan from
alpha 2.

CUPS doesn't appear to have a Brother HL-3170CDW on it list.

Obtaining a driver from Brother's support site as a .deb file, I tried
to install it with dpkg:

root@notlookedfor:/home/hendrik/Download/BrotherPrinterDriver# dpkg -i hl3170cdwlpr-1.1.2-1.i386.deb
Selecting previously unselected package hl3170cdwlpr.
(Reading database ... 118096 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack hl3170cdwlpr-1.1.2-1.i386.deb ...
Unpacking hl3170cdwlpr (1.1.2-1) ...
Setting up hl3170cdwlpr (1.1.2-1) ...
mkdir: cannot create directory ‘/var/spool/lpd/hl3170cdw’: No such file or directory
chown: cannot access ‘/var/spool/lpd/hl3170cdw’: No such file or directory
chgrp: cannot access ‘/var/spool/lpd/hl3170cdw’: No such file or directory
chmod: cannot access ‘/var/spool/lpd/hl3170cdw’: No such file or directory
root@notlookedfor:/home/hendrik/Download/BrotherPrinterDriver#


Something appears still to be missing. Where is this /var/spool/lpd/ supposed to have come from. Should I just create it and hope?

I decided to ask before I screwed everything up.

-- hendrik