Chapter 7. Hosting A Print Server

Setting up printers and print queues on Unix systems has always been viewed as a sort of black art. From a user's point of view, sending a file off to a queue and having it appear on the printer at some point in the future (especially when the printer is on another floor or in another building) can seem almost magical.

Luckily for us, it's fairly straightforward, especially with CUPS (the Common UnixPrinting System ) taking over for the traditional lpd (line printer daemon) system of printing.

In this chapter, we'll take a quick look at the old way of printing through an lpd, and then we'll move on to CUPS. Finally, we'll see how to share our CUPS print queue through Samba so that other computers on the network can print to the shared printer.