Hi All
Finally some success! :-)
Yes, printing from a non-rpm cups installation on ArcaOS can be made to work - well, my printer spate out the Test Page sent from the cups browser interface rather than the cups browser displaying all signs of being about to print and then stopping with "pending" displayed.
I have yet to setup an ArcaOS printer to test from applications but expect it to work...
Just in case anyone else has problems with the ArcaOS installed cups and needs to replace that setup with a known-to-be-working non-rpm release of cups
1] Kill the cups daemon (cupsd.exe) then use ANPM to remove all ArcaOS/yum/rpm installed cups/ghostscript/gutenprint packages - ghostscript-fonts can be left.
Having just discovered a hplip package is still installed and yum/rpm cannot Uninstall it - "Package cannot be uninstalled or no package selected" - make sure any hplip and splixx packages also get uninstalled at this stage.
2] The above uninstalls leave traces all over \user, \var and \etc so it is necessary to check those directory structures and delete any files left
3] Copy the non-rpm cups installation to disk - remember that cups/ghostscript/gutenprint must all be in the root of the same drive
4] If the non-rpm cups installation contains any of the required *nixy support executables - eg grep.exe, printf.exe - it is necessary to delete those files to avoid clashes with the yum/rpm installed *nixy files. I found I had missed 1 file which was causing problems, printing looked like it would happen but then the cups browser interface would display "pending".
5] Canon wireless printer owners using the bjnp.exe backend need to put a copy of cups17.dll into [Bootdrive]:\os2\dll - or possibly somewhere else on the libpath.
6] Point the cups daemon in Startup folder to the non-rpm cupsd.exe and start it up
7] Start browser, turn on printer, point browser to localhost:631, select Printers, click on the printer, select Maintenance and print the Test Page
8] Create the OS/2 printer - or is that ArcaOS printer now?
My choice was to copy my existing OS/2 (eCS2.2beta2) printer driver and support files over the lan - interestingly while you cannot copy or delete a *.drv file on your system without resorting to the command line there is no problem copying the file over the network using the File and Print Client gui.
I copied \os2\dll\psprint from my Desktop system to \os2\dll\psprint on my laptop by simply drag'n'dropping. I also copied \os2\dll\cups.pdr and \tcpip\bin\cupslpr.exe overwriting the ArcaOS supplied versions as they are built to work with the cups rpm packages so could cause problems.
Run the Install Printer (Printers folder) and when selecting the driver point to \os2\dll\psprint click refresh and select your printer.
When setting printer properties install and select the cups port setting the port properties to localhost and the cups printer name
A simple test: open a small file with the text editor (e.exe) and attempt to print. My attempt was successful :-)
Regards
Pete