Printer Administration

The Printer Administration module (Figure 14-8) may behave somewhat differently under different operating systems, as printer driver details and configuration often varies between systems and even between Linux distributions. Nonetheless, Webmin minimizes the differences between systems, and these directions work more or less unchanged.

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Figure 14-8: Printer Administration

When entering the Printer Administration page, you will see a list of currently configured printers, a link to Add a new printer and a button to Stop Scheduler or Start Scheduler depending on the current status of the print scheduler.

Clicking the Add a new printer link opens a page where you can configure a new printer. The Name field is an arbitrary name for the printer. Conventionally, lp or lp0 are often used for the first printer, but you can name it anything. The Description can be a longer description of the printer. Accepting requests simply sets whether the printer should be available, and Printing enabled defines whether it is enabled for printing (the queue can still receive requests with this turned off if the previous option is still on). Max print job size is the maximum size request that will be accepted. This shouldn't be too small, as many PostScript files are quite large.

The next section is Print Destination, where you define the device type (local, file, remote UNIX, or remote Windows). Many standalone network printers support standard UNIX lp functionality in addition to Windows printer sharing. If your printer is local, choose the physical device to use, and if it is a remote printer, enter the IP or host name for the host where the print queue is located. If using a Windows shared printer, enter the User, Password, and Workgroup for the printer share (Figure 14-9).

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Figure 14-9: Adding a new printer

Finally, the third section of the page is for configuring the driver for your printer (Figure 14-10). If your printer is a simple text printer or a PostScript printer, the top selection is probably right for you. The second option is for a program to handle printer control. This could be a custom print driver for your printer or one of a couple of competing commercial and non-commercial printer packages. Finally, if your system provides them, there will be a list of available drivers. This section, on Red Hat systems, is a front end to the GhostScript printer drivers that come standard with Red Hat. It's quite likely that your system will have its own set of drivers, or a front end, much like that of Red Hat.

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Figure 14-10: Adding a new printer (cont'd)

The Send EOF option is for some printers that require an explicit EOF to be sent after every page before they will print. If your printer acts as though it is preparing to print, but never does (for example, if the busy light flashes), try turning this option on. Paper size is just what it seems: the size of the paper you print from this printer. Keep in mind that this doesn't limit programs to only print on this paper size. It merely configures the standard system printing tools to print on whatever paper size is selected by default.

Pages per output page is the number of pages that will be printed per paper page. This allows you to conserve paper by printing multiple pages on a single page of paper. This option will arrange the text in rows and columns. These rows and columns can be further configured, as well as numerous other options (too many to begin to discuss here), in the next field, Additional GS options. You may wish to consult the man pages for GhostScript, as well as those for lp, lpd, and lpr, to find out more about the printer capabilities of your system. You can, of course, view these man pages in the Webmin Manual Pages module. Another good source of information regarding printing includes the Printing HOWTO [http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Printing-HOWTO/index.html] at the Linux Documentation Project [http://www.tldp.org/].



The Book of Webmin... or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love UNIX
The Book of Webmin: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love UNIX
ISBN: 1886411921
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 142
Authors: Joe Cooper

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