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14u2ponder

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Registered: 2018-04-15

Posts: 17

I have a question about Cups on a non-gui install

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Last edited by 14u2ponder (2020-09-12 22:48:19)

ooo

Member

Registered: 2013-04-10

Posts: 1,638

Re: I have a question about Cups on a non-gui install

You need to install CUPS if you want to print with GUI or not: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CUPS

You should be able to print pdf files with its standard command line tools: https://www.cups.org/doc/options.html

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,543

Website

Re: I have a question about Cups on a non-gui install

I was looking at the dependencies and i am not completely sure but I believe poppler and other programs that support PDF output Assume that you are at least running an X server, am I right?

No, this is not right.  Poppler is for reading and writing PDFs which are just files.  It has absolutely nothing to do with running an X server.

Now the poppler and cups packages for arch linux most likely do have a ridiculous number of dependencies that relate to X11 as arch packages tend to enable nearly every optional feature.  You can rebuild the packages yourself with different configure options more suited to a headless system.  Or if you're as crazy as me, you just find ways to talk directly to the printer you want to use and do away with cups.

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

14u2ponder

Banned

Registered: 2018-04-15

Posts: 17

Re: I have a question about Cups on a non-gui install

I was looking at the dependencies and i am not completely sure but I believe poppler and other programs that support PDF output Assume that you are at least running an X server, am I right?

No, this is not right.  Poppler is for reading and writing PDFs which are just files.  It has absolutely nothing to do with running an X server.

Now the poppler and cups packages for arch linux most likely do have a ridiculous number of dependencies that relate to X11 as arch packages tend to enable nearly every optional feature.  You can rebuild the packages yourself with different configure options more suited to a headless system.  Or if you're as crazy as me, you just find ways to talk directly to the printer you want to use and do away with cups.

Yeah, x11 is probably what I meant. I am too new to understand the right terminology.
So I can try to rebuild the package and strip out all the options related to gui programs that I don't use. I'll see if I am up to the task.
I just hate to pollute my headless system will gui programs.

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,543

Website

Re: I have a question about Cups on a non-gui install

I wasn't correcting on terminology of Xorg vs X11 (in fact, Xorg is really more precise in this case) rather I was highlighting the distinction between poppler itself, as a piece of software, and the poppler package distributed in the arch repos.

Check the wiki page on ABS, it's pretty easy to rebuild packages.  But also note that you'll then be responsible for rebuilding those packages whenever there is an update - pacman will not even tell you when this is.

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 78,849

Re: I have a question about Cups on a non-gui install

Poppler requires cairo and cairo is (reasonably) built w/ X11 support, thus pulls in some X11 libraries, but no X11 server.
You can just install stuff and print, no display server is required.

The only "problem" are some stale libraries (since you're not gonna use the cairo X11 backend) on your harddisk - you can simply ignore them and avoid the hassle of custom builds.

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14u2ponder

Banned

Registered: 2018-04-15

Posts: 17

Re: I have a question about Cups on a non-gui install

Poppler requires cairo and cairo is (reasonably) built w/ X11 support, thus pulls in some X11 libraries, but no X11 server.
You can just install stuff and print, no display server is required.

The only "problem" are some stale libraries (since you're not gonna use the cairo X11 backend) on your harddisk - you can simply ignore them and avoid the hassle of custom builds.

thanks, I needed this. I am trying to limit my install to basic stuff and if you think cups is fine and no issues, then I'm good with that.