Certification Objective 1.05-Printing

As of this writing, printers are not always connected or configured during the installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. You may have to install printers yourself. The default Red Hat Enterprise Linux print daemon is CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System.

There are three basic ways to configure a printer: first, you can edit the configuration files in the /etc/cups directory with a text editor, which can be a difficult process. These files are long, and the language is somewhat obscure, at least on the surface.

Through its support of the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP), CUPS provides another way toward managing printers on a network: a Web-based configuration tool using TCP/IP port 631.

The third method in RHEL 5 is with the Red Hat Printer Configuration tool, which is described in Chapter 7.

Adding Printers

The easy way to add a printer is with the Red Hat Printer Configuration tool, which is also known by the command used to start it from a terminal, system-config-printer. I recommend that you learn to use this GUI tool. Unless you're a CUPS expert, it's a faster way to configure printers on the RHCT and RHCE exams. I show you how to use this utility in Chapter 7.

Print Commands

Three basic commands are associated with printing in Linux, as described in Table 1-5.

Table 1-5: Linux Print Commands

Command	Description
lpr	The basic print command; lpr filename prints that file.
lpq	Query the print queue for status; lpr -l lists print job numbers.
lprm	Remove a specific job, usually specified by job number, from the printer queue.