Printer Configuration

9.3 Printer Configuration

The printer configuration tool (printtool) maintains /etc/printcap, print spool directories, and print filters. The filters allow you to print many different types of files, including:

plain text (ASCII) files
PostScript files
TeX .dvi files
GIF, JPEG, TIFF, and other graphics formats
RPMs

Simply printing a GIF or RPM file using lpr does ``the right thing''.

Figure 53: Print Tool

In order to create a new print queue, choose Add. Then, select what type of printer is being added. There are 3 types of print queues which can be configured with printtool:

Local: print queues are for printers attached to a printer or serial port on your Red Hat Linux system.
Remote: print queues are attached to a different system which you can access over a TCP/IP network.
SMB: print queues are attached to a different system which uses LAN-Manager-type (SMB) networking.

Figure 54: Selecting a Printer Type

After you choosing the printer type, a dialog requests further information about the print queue. All types of print queues require the following information:

Queue Name: What the queue will be called. Multiple names can be specifed with the | (pipe) character separating entries.
Spool Directory: This is the directory on the local machine where files are stored before printing occurs. Be careful to not have more than one printer queue use a given spool directory.
File Limit: Maximum size print job accepted, in kilobytes (1 kb = 1024 bytes). A size of 0 indicates no limit should be imposed.
Input Filter: Filters convert printed files into a format the printer can handle. Press Select to choose the filter which best matches your printer.
In addition to configuring print queue able to print graphical and PostScript output you can configure a text-only printer, which will only print plain ASCII text. Most printer drivers are also able to print ASCII text without converting it to PostScript first; simply choose Fast text printing when you configure the filter. Please Note: This only works for non-PostScript printers.
Suppress Headers: Check this if you don't want a header page to be printed at the beginning of each print job.

For local printers, the following are also required:

Printer Device: Usually /dev/lp1, the name of the port which the printer is attached to. Serial printers are usually on /dev/ttyS? ports. You will need to manually configure serial parameters.

Figure 55: Adding a Local Printer

Figure 56: Configuring a Print Filter

For remote printers, fill in the following information:

Remote Host: Hostname of the remote machine hosting the printer.

Remote Queue: Name of the queue to print to on the remote machine.

The remote machine must be configured to allow the local machine to print on the desired queue. Typically /etc/hosts.lpd controls this.

Figure 57: Adding a Remote Printer

For SMB printers, fill in the following information:

Hostname of Printer Server: Name of the machine to which the printer you want to use is attached.

IP number of Server: The IP address of the machine to which the printer you want to use is attached; this is optional.

Printer Name: Name of the printer on which you want to print.

User: Name of user you must login as to access the printer (typically guest for Windows servers, or nobody for samba servers).

Password: Password (if required) to use the printer (typically blank). Someone should be able to tell you this if you do not already know it.

Please Note: If you need to use a username and password for an SMB (LAN Manager) print queue, they are stored unencrypted in a local script and must be passed on the command line to the smbclient program. Thus, it is possible for another person to learn the username and password. It is therefore recommended that the username and password for use of the printer not to be the same as that for a user account on the local Red Hat Linux system, so that the only possible security compromise would be unauthorized use of the printer. If there are file shares from the SMB server, it is recommended that they also use a different password than the one for the print queue.

After you have added your print queue, you may need to restart the printer daemon (lpd). To do so, choose Restart lpd from the lpd menu.

You may print a test page for any print queue you have configured. Select the type of test page you would like to print from the Tests menu.

Figure 58: Printing a Test Page