Can't find lpr or lprng package in Mageia 4 ...

[josh]

I am in the process of migrating a home-brewed router/printer/mediaserver from Mandriva 2009 to Mageia 4.

There is a USB printer attached which is only used in raw mode via Samba. Now I can't transfer that setup to Mageia - because there does not seem to be a "lpd" or "lpr" package anymore.

Can this be real? Or did I not search hard enough?

[doktor5000]

Interesting that you don't have this installed already. It's contained in cups-common, which gets installed along with cups.
Please show the output of

Code: Select all

rpm -qa | grep cups | sort

This is what it looks like (seems there are multiple versions of lpr, hence the alternatives mechanism comes to play)

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[doktor5000@Mageia4 ~]$ which lpr
/usr/bin/lpr
[doktor5000@Mageia4 ~]$ ls -al /usr/bin/lpr
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 Okt 13  2013 /usr/bin/lpr -> /etc/alternatives/lpr*
[doktor5000@Mageia4 ~]$ ls -al /etc/alternatives/lpr
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 Apr 25 22:31 /etc/alternatives/lpr -> /usr/bin/lpr-cups*
[doktor5000@Mageia4 ~]$ ls -al /usr/bin/lpr-cups
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 15648 Apr 22 16:34 /usr/bin/lpr-cups*
[doktor5000@Mageia4 ~]$ rpm -qf /usr/bin/lpr-cups
cups-common-1.7.0-7.1.mga4

For lpd, it's not contained in standard PATH, but it looks like this:

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[doktor5000@Mageia4 ~]$ urpmf lpd | grep cups | sort -u
cups-common:/usr/share/man/man8/cups-lpd.8.xz
cups:/usr/lib/cups/backend/lpd
cups:/usr/lib/cups/daemon/cups-lpd
cups:/usr/lib/systemd/system/cups-lpd.socket
cups:/usr/lib/systemd/system/cups-lpd@.service
cups:/usr/share/cups/doc/help/man-cups-lpd.html

Not sure which you need, probably /usr/lib/cups/backend/lpd

Please check our software management MAQeia for more information on software and package management.

[josh]

Thanks for the reply. I had indeed temporarily installed cups-common but uninstalled again when I could not just call "lpd".

I had assumed that this is a customized lpd version which is only useable via CUPS.

I'll try again, now that I see that it includes a systemd service.

[josh]

Just a little follow up:

In the end, I installed "lprng" from source, with quite some tweaking.

I think people should not be stuck with CUPS. On resource-constrained systems there should be a sleek alternative.
If I find some time between my other projects, I'll try to master the art of RPM building and contribute a "lpr" package. Not having this in Mageia is a regression, in my view.

Thanks anyway!

[doktor5000]

Maybe you want to have a look at https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Packaging_Seminars
You can also ask here if you have specific packaging questions, I'd be happy to help.