After enduring a lot of sweat on CUPS and CentOS 5.2, here is my solution to make it work. It was NOT fun.

CUPS
The setup of CUPS is tough on a command line interface. Here are the steps to make it as painless as possible.


GHOSTSCRIPT
CUPS uses postscript printing and without ghostscript you can’t make it work at ALL. If you install a command line version of the file server you must install this manually since this is tied into X. You need three packages

ghostscript
ghostscript-fonts
Urw-fonts

Usually you can do

apt-get install ghostscript or
yum install ghostscript


FOOMATIC
Yup sometimes this is NOT included so you need this as well. foomatic-filter is the filter for page margins, etc and you need them to process documents as the ppd file does not determine page sizes.

yum install foomatic or
apt-get install foomatic

(not recommended as this bypasses the installer
http://www.linuxprinting.org/download/foomatic/ and download the latest foomatic-filters.tar.gz (version 3.0 as of this writing). Then do the following:

tar -xzf foomatic-filters-3.0.0.tar.gz
./configure
make
cp foomatic-rip /usr/lib/cups/filter/

DRIVERS
Not so bad. Now you need a driver.
Go to Linuxprinting.org. On the left side navigation bar, select The Database-> Printer Listings. Select your make/model printer, then click on the Show button. The next page will give you the option to generate a ppd file for your printer. Click on download PPD and save the file to /usr/share/cups/model. The file should be in a model.ppd format, if not, then rename it to my_printer.ppd.

Note:
CUPS tends to store them as .gz but I had no problem just leaving it as a .ppd (post script driver)


PRINTERS
You obviously must install printers. You can either create and/or edit the text file (printers.conf) and create .ppd files to correspond to the printer names or better you can use lpadmin to do it for you.

lpadmin

-p (name of printer for the queue which of course means any name you want
-v (where it is. lpd is a print server, /dev/lpt1 is local, ipp is an internet printer)
-m use a .ppd file
-i where the .ppd file is located.
-E enable the printer. Very important (duh)


Here are two examples

lpadm -p (printer queue) -E -v (where it's located) -m -i (name and location of ppd file)
lpadmin -p Deskjet3650 -E -v lpd://192.168.10.200/deskjet3650 -m -i /usr/share/cups/model/HP-DeskJet_3650-hpijs.ppd



MAKE A DEFAULT
lpadm –d (name of printer)
lpadm –d laserjet5l (has to match the –p option)

DO IT
This should just work

lp (name of file) –P (name of printer)

COMMANDS
Lprm
Deletes a printing job but I recommend – to kill them all

lprm -P (name of printer) -
lprm -P Deskjet3650 - kills all print jobs

lpstat
tells the status of the printers.

Note I gave up on the CUPS web interface and honestly I find this much more flexible...once you get the idea.

Thank you for your notes. I'm going to add a link to it on my page, (especially since, as mentioned, my page is quite dated.)

No problem Scott. It was about 8 hours of sweat to get that information. One thing about docs for CUPS is that it's all over the place and you always encounter hiccups.

Might want to add Scott since I didn't make it clear that this involves a nonpostscript printer. if you have a postscript printer you don't NEED ghostscript. Ghostscript translates postscript into whatever language the printer supports (you can probably assume PCL -- Printer COntrol language. Doing this of course can be a demand on a server since ghostscript does a lot of work and requires CPU time. On an older machine it can feel like a fat belly.
You can also use just a RAW driver but I've never had success with that and tend to spit out pages on the printer since it doesn't handle the information properly. Hope that helps.

Excellent, thank you. (I can be lazy about it now though, since the link goes to this thread.)