Chapter 9. Printer Sharing via LPD

Linux has inherited its printing system from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) UNIX variant. This system, which is often referred to by the name of its most critical component, the Line Printer Daemon (LPD), is both extremely flexible and very primitive when compared to the printing systems on modern desktop OSs such as Windows or MacOS. LPD's flexibility derives from the fact that it's a network-capable printing system. Thus, there's no need to run a separate print server or print client to perform network printing operations; the basic printing system includes both network client and network server functionality. The primitive nature of LPD relates to its handling of drivers to process output for the wide variety of printers that are on the market today. LPD doesn't explicitly support printer drivers in the way they're used on other OSs, although a common add-on package (Ghostscript, see http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/), in conjunction with a smart filter to identify and process different types of files, roughly fills this role.

This chapter discusses the network features of LPD, as well as a more modern protocol that's becoming increasingly popular. This chapter does not cover configuring a computer to drive a particular model of local printer via Ghostscript and a smart filter. For that information, consult your distribution's documentation or an introductory book on Linux. This chapter begins with an overview of the LPD landscape ”when you should run an LPD server and what options exist for printing software under Linux. This chapter then proceeds to examine how to configure each of the three most common printing systems under Linux: the original BSD LPD, the LPRng replacement package, and the newer CUPS package.