Overview

Sharing printers is a good way to save money and make your printing more efficient. Very few people need to print all the time, but when they do want to print something, they usually need it quickly. Setting up a print server can save money by eliminating the need for a printer at every workstation. Some of those savings can be used to buy printers that can output more pages per minute or have higher-quality output.

You can attach printers to your Red Hat Linux system to make them available to users of that system or to other computers on the network. You can configure your Red Hat Linux printer as a remote CUPS or LPR Linux printer, a Samba printer, or a NetWare printer. With Samba and NetWare, you are emulating Windows and NetWare servers.

This chapter describes configuring and using printers in Red Hat Linux. It focuses on Common UNIX Printing Service (CUPS), which is the recommended print service for the current version of Red Hat Linux. To configure CUPS printers, this chapter focuses on the Red Hat Printer Configuration window (redhat-config-printer command).

Once a local printer is configured, print commands (such as lpr) are available for carrying out the actual printing. Commands also exist for querying print queues (lpq), manipulating print queues (lpc), and removing print queues (lprm). A local printer can also be shared as a print server to users on other computers on your network.