FIGURE 19.14 Select how the printer is connected.
FIGURE 19.15 Enter the connection details as appropriate for your printer connection and as shown in the examples.
Again click Continue and select a printer make, as requested in the dialog box shown in Figure 19.16.
FIGURE 19.16 Select a printer make when creating a new queue.
After you click Continue, you then select the driver. After creating the printer, you can then use the Printer page, as shown in Figure 19.17, to print a test page, stop printing service, manage the local print queue, modify the printer entry, or add another printer.
FIGURE 19.17 Manage printers easily, using the CUPS Printer page.
CUPS offers many additional features and after it is installed, configured, and running, and provides transparent traditional UNIX printing support for Fedora.
To learn more about CUPS and to get a basic overview of the system, browse to http://www.cups.org/.
Console Print Control
Older versions of Red Hat Linux used the 4.3BSD line-printer spooling system and its suite of text-based printing utilities. Newer versions of these utilities, with the same names, are included with your Fedora DVD, but are part of the CUPS package. The commands support the launching of print jobs in the background (as a background process), the printing of multiple documents, the capability to specify local and networked printers, control of the printers, and management of the queued documents waiting in the printer's spool queue.
Using Basic Print Commands
After configuring your printer, you can print from the desktop, using any printer-capable graphical clients. If you do not use the desktop but prefer to use or access your Fedora system via a text-based interface, you can enter a number of print commands from the command line, too. The main CUPS commands used to print and control printing from the command line are as follows:
> lp — The line-printer spooling command; used to print documents that use a specific printer
> lpq — The line-printer queue display command; used to view the existing list of documents waiting to be printed
> lpstat — Displays server and printer status information
> lprm — The line-printer queue management command; used to remove print jobs from a printer's queue
> lpc — The line-printer control program; used by the root operator to manage print spooling, the lpd daemon, and printer activity
These commands offer a subset of the features provided by CUPS, but can be used to start and control printers and print queues from the command line.
You print files (documents or images) by using the lp command, along with a designated printer and filename. For example, to print the file mydoc.txt with the printer named lp, use the lp command, its -d command-line option, and the printer's name, like this:
# lp -dlp mydoc.txt
Managing Print Jobs
You can also print multiple documents from the command line. For example, to simultaneously print a number of files to the lp printer, use lpr like so:
# lp -dlp *.txt
This approach uses the wildcard capabilities of the shell to feed the lpr command all files in the current directory with a name ending in .txt for printing. Use the lpq command to view the printer's queue, as follows:
# lpq
lp is ready and printing
Rank Owner Job File(s) Total Size
active root 7 classes.conf 3072 bytes
The lpq command reports on the job, owner, job number, file being printed, and size of job. The job number (7 in this example) is used by CUPS to keep track of documents printing or waiting to be printed. Each job has a unique job number. To stop the print job in this example, use the lprm command, followed by the job number, like this:
# lprm 7
The lprm command removes the spooled files from the printer's queue and kills the job. Print job owners, such as regular users, can remove only spooled jobs that they own. As the root operator, you can kill any job.
Only the root operator can use the lpc command to administer printers and queues because the command is primarily used for printer and queue control. You, as a regular user, cannot use it to rearrange the order of your print jobs, but you can get a display of the status of any system printer. Start lpc on the command line like this:
# /usr/sbin/lpc
The lpc command has built-in help, but it consists of only five commands: exit, help, quit, status, and ?. The status command shows the status of a specified printer or all printers:
# lpc
lpc> ?
Commands may be abbreviated. Commands are:
exit help quit status ?
lpc> status
lp:
printer is on device 'parallel' speed -1
queuing is enabled
printing is enabled
no entries
daemon present
netlp:
printer is on device 'parallel' speed -1
