Red Hat® Linux® 7 Unleashed

Linux Printing Commands

Of course, you don't have to use the printtool command to set up your printer. You can edit /etc/printcap directly, but you should know what you're doing and understand printcap's format. This file, an ASCII database of your system's local and networked printers, describes the capabilities of each printer in detail. For full details, see the printcap man page for commands and the termcap man page for the file's layout.

In fact, you can have multiple entries for each printer, which is helpful if you want to print different size papers, print color or black-and-white documents by switching cartridges, or change printer trays.

Old versions of Red Hat Linux used the 4.3BSD line-printer spooling system. This system has a number ...