I'm almost finished setting up a small home network for shared printing. The server seems to be working fine so I'll skip the details there. The only running client at the moment is a dual-boot XP/debian box. The windows side works fine using samba. The Linux side is little more problematic using cups. I configured the printer using cups' web interface, set the shared printer as default, and can print the test page from there. I can also print from the command line using lp, but not lpr. Of course, I also can't print from any application that defaults to using lpr (firebird, thunderbird, emacs, etc.). I can print from gedit as long as I manually set the default printer to "HL-1440" instead of "Generic Postscript" which always comes up as default. If I specify the shared printer using the -P flag with lpr I get an "HL-1440: unknown printer" message.

What's the best fix for this? Hopefully it's something that doesn't involve manually reconfiguring all my graphical applications.

lpr is a different printing methodology. It has its own printer configuration file so doesn't use the CUPS configuration stuff.

I installed CUPS because I couldn't get lpr working very well on my Debian. CUPS works like a champ so I don't see a reason to mess with lpr. You can have a look at /etc/printcap for setup for lpr printers. I did find threads for this in my search back then but they mostly were for setting up local (serial/parallel attached) printers. Examples for network attached did get me going but then I found I'd have to convert things to print properly.