Andrew Hudson - Fedora™ Unleashed, 2008 edition

You can configure printing services using either the command line system-config-printer-tuiprogram or the system-config-printer-guigraphical interface. Most of the detailed information in this chapter refers to the use of the GUI. The overview sections that follow, however, give you a solid foundation in both configuration approaches. You learn the details of these processes in later sections of the chapter.

Configuring a printer for Fedora is easy but you must use root permission to do it. Make sure that the cupsddaemon 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 whether cupsdis running, you can quickly drop to a terminal and use the servicecommand with the name of the service and the statuskeyword like so:

# service cups status

You will see either

cupsd is stopped

or, if cupsdis running, an acknowledgement, along with its process ID, such as

cupsd (pid 2378) is running...

If cupsdis installed but not running, start the daemon like so:

# /etc/rc.d/init.d/cups start

You can also use the servicecommand to start the daemon, like so:

# service cups start

If you are using the desktop, select System, Administration, Printing. 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 you enter 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.

The system-config-printerutility is an update to the now-legacy printtoolclient 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-guiinstalled on your system, you should use the system-config-printerclient to manage printers under Fedora.

After 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 8.1 contains a partial list of CUPS and related printing commands and drivers included with Fedora.

TABLE 8.1 Print-Related Commands and Drivers

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 gsto display its built-in printer devices by using the gs interpreter with its --helpcommand-line option like this:

# gs --help

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 gvclient. To display Portable Document Format (PDF) documents, you can use gvor the xpdfclient.

The gscommand 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 gsand then use the devicenames ==command like this:

# gs

GPL Ghostscript 8.60 (2007-08-01)

Copyright (C) 2007 Artifex Software, Inc. All rights reserved.

...Input formats: PostScript PostScriptLevel1 PostScriptLevel2 PostScriptLevel3 PDF

Default output device: display

Available devices:

alc1900 alc2000 alc4000 alc4100 alc8500 alc8600 alc9100 ap3250 appledmp

atx23 atx24 atx38 bbox bit bitcmyk bitrgb bj10e bj10v bj10vh bj200 bjc600

bjc800 bjc880j bjccmyk bjccolor bjcgray bjcmono bmp16 bmp16m bmp256

bmp32b bmpa16 bmpa16m bmpa256 bmpa32b bmpamono bmpasep1 bmpasep8 bmpgray

bmpmono bmpsep1 bmpsep8 ccr cdeskjet cdj1600 cdj500 cdj550 cdj670 cdj850

cdj880 cdj890 cdj970 cdjcolor cdjmono cfax cgm24 cgm8 cgmmono chp2200 cif

cljet5 cljet5c cljet5pr coslw2p coslwxl cp50 cups declj250 deskjet

devicen dfaxhigh dfaxlow display dj505j djet500 djet500c dl2100 dnj650c

epl2050 epl2050p epl2120 epl2500 epl2750 epl5800 epl5900 epl6100 epl6200

eps9high eps9mid epson epsonc epswrite escp escpage faxg3 faxg32d faxg4

...

Search path:

. : /usr/share/ghostscript/8.15/lib :

/usr/share/ghostscript/8.15/Resource : /usr/share/ghostscript/fonts :