Open SUSE® 11.0 and SUSE® Linux® Enterprise Server Bible

Chapter 19. Setting Up Printing with CUPS

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Setting up local printers with YaST

• Printing to remote printers

• Setting up a print server for the local network

• Setting up clients on Linux or Windows

• Using the CUPS web interface

• Controlling printing with command-line tools

• CUPS logs

• Documentation

In the early days of Linux, printing was difficult to set up and equally difficult to manage. The print system was known as LPD (line printer daemon). Just as with X configuration, in the early days, at least, grown men wept. I still have bitter memories from 1997 of trying to make sense of the Linux Printing HOWTO and then, when I thought I had cracked it, ending up with a huge stack of paper covered in apparent garbage (raw PostScript code).

Fortunately, those days are gone. The standard now is CUPS (the Common Unix Print System), which implements (among other protocols) IPP (the Internet Printing Protocol). CUPS is also used by Mac OS X and is available for other forms of Unix.

A CUPS server can act as a print server for clients running all operating systems, including Windows. This means that it is not necessary for a Linux server to run Samba (see Chapter 18) to offer printing services to Windows clients.

On SUSE Linux, as one would expect, the configuration of printing has been integrated into YaST. In most cases, YaST's printer configuration tool is all you need to set up printing—both for a single machine and for a print server for a small local network. If you need a print server ...