Printing

Lars blogged about printers, mainly about how he's dissatisfied with the current state of affairs. I agree that a state of affairs as he describes it would suck. Luckily, reality is a bit better

You really should try installing CUPS, and the foomatic-filters-ppds package¹. Once that is done, edit /etc/cups/cupsd.conf on any machine having a printer connected to it, and find the option "BrowseAddress". Enable it (there are enough comments in the file explaining you how to do that; make sure it doesn't send out stuff to machines on other networks). Once you restart cupsd, it will start to broadcast a list of printers available to it, and other machines in the network also running cupsd will pick it up (unless you disabled browsing on those machines) and make the printers available to the local system.

Using this setup, I do not have to reconfigure my laptop every time I want to print; both at home and at the office, I have systems broadcasting their printers; and all applications that directly support CUPS (rather than using lpr) will show me a list of printers available on the network. So, the network part of Lars' problems are already solved.

That leaves the manual setup of printer queues. Cups allows you to do this via an easy web interface (which, by default, only listens on localhost), but there are other options. Unfortunately, though, I don't think it's possible (yet) to make it as easy as Lars would want. But it's not as if it's hard...

¹based on the views expressed in that packages' description, one could say that the maintainer of said package would probably disagree; but I find it much easier to just install a full list of prebuilt files rather than having to manually run foomatic-ppdfile and having to remember where to put the file.