KC's Newest Linux user!

[Jim Herrmann]

On Wednesday 27 November 2002 02:53 am, Duane Attaway wrote:
> > I noticed in top that a user lp is running programs imagetoraster and
> > rastertoprint.  These appear to be related to CUPS, but what do they do?
> > I'm wondering if I can get rid of these, and if so, how?  Any ideas?
>
> Congratulations introducing another satisfied customer.  My mom is next.
>
> You might like the command pstree.  It will give you a structured view of
> what runs what, starting with init as the root of all processes.  Let me
> know if you don't have this command.

I have it.  That's a pretty cool command.  I like it.  And I can see that it's 
evil twin below would be handy in certain cases.

>
> You can kill its parent with the killall command.  killall -9 <process> is
> the magic bullet.  Sometimes a process has chosen to ignore kill signals.
> That's when you kill its parent or up the tree to its grandparents.
>
> Its just a wild guess, but I'd imagine these raster processes have
> something to do with the desktop process making snapshots of the screen
> for printing.  Sounds poorly implimented as something you don't currently
> need shouldn't be using megawatts of cpu cycles.

I found some information on them.  They are CUPS filters.  I think it has to 
do with the fact that she has a photo printer, which is probably raster 
rather than postscript.  That would explain why I don't have them.  I think 
she needs them to use the photo printer, but it seems stupid for them to run 
and run and run, getting a new pid each time they run.

BTW, after I installed her printers, the next time I looked at mine printer 
list, her printers were automatically there!  I didn't do anything special on 
my machine.  It just found them on the network.  Who says linux is hard to 
use?!!

Thanks Duane,
Jim