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.
Verify that IPP and Port 9100 are enabled at the printer.
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.
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.
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.
lp -dprinter filename (<Enter>)
Use the -P option with the lpr command to print to a specific printer.
lpr -Pprinter filename (<Enter>)
For complete information on CUPS printing capabilities, see the CUPS Software Users Manual available from www.cups.org/documentation.php.