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Your task as a system administrator (or root operator of your workstation) is to properly define local or remote printers and to ensure that printing services are enabled and running properly. Fortunately, Fedora includes Red Hat's graphical print service configuration tools that make this job easy. You should use these tools to configure printing, as you learn in this section of the chapter. But first, take a moment to read through a quick overview of the configuration process. CAUTION Do not manually edit your /etc/printcap. Any changes will be lost when printing service is restarted or if your system is rebooted. If you need to create customized printer entries, save the entries in /etc/printcap.local and then restart print service. You can configure printing services using either the command line system-config-printer-tui program or the system-config-printer-gui graphical interface. Most of the detailed information in this chapter refers to the use of the GUI. The overview sections that follow, however, give you solid foundation in both configuration approaches. You learn the details of these processes in later sections of the chapter. GUI-based Printer Configuration QuickstartConfiguring a printer for Fedora is easy but must be done using root permission. Make sure that the cupsd daemon is installed and running. If you elect to use printing support when you install Fedora, the daemon and related software will be installed. If you're not sure if cupsd is running, you can use the service command with the name of the service and the status keyword like so: # service cups status You will either see cupsd is stopped or if cupsd is running, an acknowledgement, along with its process ID, such as: cupsd (pid 2923) is running... If cupsd is installed but not running, start the daemon like so: # /etc/rc.d/init.d/cups start You can also start the daemon using the service command like so: # service cups start If you are using the desktop, select the Printing menu item from the System Settings menu. You will be asked to enter the root password. If not, you are using X as root, which is a bad idea. Log out, and then log back in as a regular user! After entering the root password, the printer configuration dialog appears. You then simply follow the prompts to define your printer and add local or remote printing services. You should print a test page before saving your changes. Use the printer configuration client or the File menu's Print menu item from a GNOME or KDE client. NOTE The system-config-printer utility is an update to the now-legacy printtool client included with previous Red Hat Linux distributions. Although you might also find related tools (or symbolic links), such as printtool, printconf-tui, and /usr/sbin/printconf-gui installed on your system, you should use the system-config-printer client to manage printers under Fedora. Console-based Printer Configuration QuickstartLocal or remote print services can also be configured locally or on a server without the X Window System. To do so, you use Fedora's text-based system-config-printer-tui printer configuration utility. You need to run this command as root: # system-config-printer-tui The screen clears after you press Enter, and you will see the command's main dialog. (You see this screen in the section titled "Console-based Print Commands," later in this chapter.) NOTE If you launch system-config-printer as root when not using X at a console, the system-config-printer-tui interface will be used. You use the Tab key and spacebar to navigate the dialogs and expand lists of devices. You can create a new printer entry by highlighting the New button and pressing Enter. Use the Up or Down cursor keys to select and highlight an existing entry; then highlight the Edit button and press Enter to edit a previously defined printer. You can then print documents from the command line using the lpr command, view any active jobs using the lpq command, and control the print queue by using the lrpm command. Managing Printing ServicesAfter defining a printer, you can use the command line to view and control your print jobs, or if root, all print jobs and printers on your system. Table 11.1 contains a partial list of CUPS and related printing commands and drivers included with Fedora.
Most Linux systems use PostScript as the default document format for printing. Fedora uses the gs command along with CUPS to manage local and remote print jobs and the type of data transferred during a print job. The gs command is used to translate the document stream into a format accepted by the destination printer (which most likely uses HPCL). You can use the Ghostscript interpreter gs to display its built-in printer devices by using the gs interpreter with its --help command-line option like this: # gs --help NOTE Fedora includes graphical clients you can use to view many different types of documents. For example, to display PostScript documents (including compressed PostScript documents) or PostScript images, use the gv client. To display Portable Document Format (PDF) documents, you can use gv or the xpdf client. The gs command outputs many lines of help text on command-line usage and then lists built-in printer and graphics devices. Another way to get this information is to start gs and then use the devicenames == command like this: # gs GNU Ghostscript 7.05 (2002-04-22) Copyright (C) 2002 artofcode LLC, Benicia, CA. All rights reserved. This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file PUBLIC for details. Loading NimbusRomNo9L-Regu font from /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1/ ¬n021003l.pfb... \ 2410668 1053956 1642520 347466 0 done. Loading NimbusSanL-Regu font from /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1/n019003l.pfb... 2785628 1379834 1662616 358654 0 done. Using NimbusSansL-Regu font for NimbusSanL-Regu. [/miff24 /psmono /alc8500 /lp2563 /pkmraw /stp /iwlq /pbm /md1xMono /epson /bjc600 ¬/lbp310 \ /coslw2p /cdjcolor /bj10v /cdj1600 /djet500 /x11rg16x /atx23 /x11gray4 /st800 ¬/jpeggray /necp6 \ /psgray /alc2000 /lp8000 /pksm /lxm3200 /jetp3852 /pbmraw /DJ630 /epsonc /bjc800 ¬/lbp320 \ /coslwxl /cdjmono /bj10vh /cdj500 /laserjet /x11rg32x /atx24 /x11mono /stcolor ¬/pdfwrite /oce9050 \ /psrgb /cups /lq850 /pksmraw /lx5000 /la50 /pgm /DJ6xx /escp /faxg3 /lips2p /cp50 ¬/cdj550 \ /mag16 /cdj670 /ljetplus /ljet4pjl /atx38 /bmpmono /sunhmono /pswrite /oki182 /bit ¬/cljet5 /lxm5700m \ /tiffcrle /lex7000 /la70 /pgmraw /DJ6xxP /fs600 /faxg32d /bjc880j /declj250 /pj ¬/mag256 /cdj850 /ljet2p\ /lj4dithp /bmpa16 /bmpgray /t4693d2 /epswrite /okiibm /bitrgb /cljet5c /m8510 ¬/tiffg3 /lex5700 /la75 ... Not all the devices are listed in this example.
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