Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS)  C1h

The Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) was created by Easy Software Products in 1998 as a modern replacement for the Berkeley Line Printer Daemon (LPD) and AT&T Line Printer (LP) system designed in the 1970's for printing text to line printers.

Currently available for downloading from a number of sources on the Internet, such as www.cups.org, CUPS is offered in both source code and binary distributions.

Before You Start

Verify that IPP and Port 9100 are enabled at the printer.

1. At the printer, from the Setup menu, select [Gateways…], then the IPP tab. Verify that the Printer URL fields are filled in. The correct format for each field is: http://<controller name>.<domain name>.com:631/servlet/IPPServlet.IppPrinter. Note that <controller name>.<domain name>.com can be replaced by the printer's IP address. If the IPP selections are unavailable, select [Feature Licenses…] from the Setup menu and verify that the IPP license is present and enabled. Complete instructions are available in the Checking Installed Options with License Manager procedure in the Required Set Up Steps section of this guide.
2. At the printer, from the Setup menu, select [Gateways…], then the Socket tab. Verify that Port 9100 is Enabled. If it is not, select [Port 9100], right click the system mouse, and select [Enable]. Click <Apply> or <OK> to save the new setting. If the Port 9100 selections are unavailable, select [Feature Licenses…] from the Setup menu and verify that the TCP/IP Socket license is present and enabled. Complete instructions are available in the Checking Installed Options with License Manager procedure in the Required Set Up Steps section of this guide.

Installing CUPS on the UNIX workstation

The instructions for installing and building CUPS are contained in the CUPS Software Administrators Manual, written and copyrighted by Easy Software Products and available for downloading at www.cups.org/documentation.php. An Overview of the Common UNIX Printing System, Version 1.1 by Easy Software is also available at this site.

A case history of the building and installation of CUPS source code on a FreeBSD 4.2 machine, is described in the article entitled Using CUPS--the Common UNIX Printing System, by Ralph Krause, available at www.cups.org, through the links/documentation/tutorials/BSD Today - Using CUPS selections. Directory locations for the CUPS files, as described in this article, are the following:

- Programs were copied to /usr/local/bin and usr/local/sbin.
- Documentation was copied to /usr/local/share/docs/cups.
- A directory called /usr/local/share/cups was created for various CUPS data files.
- The configuration files were copied to /usr/local/etc/cups.

The binary distribution of CUPS is available in tar format with installation and removal scripts, as well as in rpm and dpkg formats for RedHat and Debian versions of Linux. After logging into the workstation as root (su) and downloading the appropriate files to the root directory, the CUPS installation process begins as follows:

Tar format:

After untarring the files, run the installation script with ./cups.install (and press <Enter>).

RPM format:

rpm -e lpr
rpm -i cups-1.1-linux-M.m.n-intel.rpm (and press <Enter>).

Debian format:

dpkg -i cups-1.1-linux-M.m.n-intel.deb (and press <Enter>).

Note: RedHat Linux, versions 7.3 and newer, include CUPS support, so software downloading is unnecessary. Also, CUPS is the default printing system used by Mandrake Linux.

Installing the Xerox PPD on the workstation

The Xerox PPD for CUPS is available on one of the CD-ROMs that came with your printer and available for downloading from the Internet at www.xerox.com.

From the CD-ROM or from the downloaded Internet file, with root privileges copy the PPD into your cups ppd folder on your workstation. If you are unsure of the folder's location, use the Find command to locate the ppd's. An example of the location of the ppd.gz files in RedHat 8.1 is /usr/share/cups/model.

Adding the Xerox printer

1. Use the PS command to make sure that the CUPS daemon is running. The daemon can be restarted from Linux using the init.d script that was created when the CUPS RPM was installed. The command is > /etc/init.d/cups restart. A similar script or directory entry should have been created in System V and BSD. For the example of CUPS built and installed on a FreeBSD 4.2 machine from the source code, run cupsd from /usr/local/sbin. (cd /usr/local/sbin cupsd press <Enter>).
2. Type http://localhost:631/admin into the address (URL) box of your web browser and press <Enter>.
3. For User ID, type root. For the requested password, type the root password.
4. Click [Add Printer] and follow the on screen prompts to add the printer to the CUPS printer list.

Printing with CUPS

CUPS supports the use of both the System V (lp) and Berkeley (lpr) printing commands.

Use the -d option with the lp command to print to a specific printer.

Use the -P option with the lpr command to print to a specific printer.

For complete information on CUPS printing capabilities, see the CUPS Software Users Manual available from www.cups.org/documentation.php.