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Conventions used in this document
================================
In this README we will use 'cups' to refer to versions 1.6.x (and newer)
of the Debian package. When necessary, other versions will be specified
explicitly. This is because there is a very important difference in the
behaviour of cups and cups 1.5.x (or older versions) regarding advertising
print queues. In almost every other regard, the behaviour of cups is
identical to its preceding versions.
We will we also use 'standard' to mean a Debian cups installation which
pulls in all recommended packages. This will set you up with a complete
filtering system and an extensive selection of printer drivers and PPD
files.
Print queues, drivers and printers
==================================
Below is an outline view of the progress of a job through the printing
system:
Submitted cups scheduler Filtering system Transport mechanism
print -> and -> plus -> USB, network, -> Printer
job print queue drivers etc
For this to take place successfully the scheduler must be told:
* Which driver the job is to use (a PPD file)
* The transport mechanism (the device-uri)
Given these two things, it will then have a print queue set up to submit
the job to. Reading lpinfo(8) and lpadmin(8) will give you more on the
fundamental way of establishing a queue.
Debian supports printers via printer driver executables and PPD files in
the cups, ghostscript. foomatic and printer-driver-* packages. It is more
than likely you will find something to suit you from this collection of
free software. If needs be, a manufacturer supplied PPD can be provided
using lpadmin or the web interface.
Prior to setting up a queue it is a good idea to visit
http://www.openprinting.org
to get some idea from its extensive database as to which drivers are
suitable for your printer.
Setting up a local print queue
==============================
The command line tools, lpadmin and lpinfo, can be used for this. Also,
depending on what is installed on your system, a queue may be set up in an
automated way. However, cups provides a web interface to accomplish the
same task. It is accessed from a browser with
http://localhost:631
There is copious documentation under 'Online Help' and 'Printers' will
display a list of local and remote print queues.
'Administration' is where you need to be to set up a local print queue.
At some point you will be required to authenticate. A User Name of 'root'
and root's password is always acceptable. Any other user must be a member
of the lpadmin group.
By default cups is configured only to allow connections to local queues
from localhost, effectively disabling printing to them from other
machines on the network. The web interface or cupsd.conf and printers.conf
in /etc/cups can be used to alter this behaviour.
Printing to advertised, shared print queues
===========================================
Suppose you are on a network which has a server using the
Bonjour/DNS-SD/mDNS protocol to advertise its local print queues as being
shared. Your machine will have a list of the advertised queues if you have
avahi-daemon installed and running. But your cups needs a little help to
access this list. It can get assistance from cups-browsed.
In its default setup cups-browsed will see exactly what avahi-daemon sees.
From this information it creates local queues which, just like the local
queues you may have created yourself, are capable of being used by your
applications. The difference is that the discovered queues are raw queues:
any job sent to them is processed on the remote machine, not on your
machine.
A standard cups installation includes avahi-daemon and cups-browsed. This
means your machine will pick up the Bonjour broadcasts of remote servers
and, without any further configuration, you will have its queues listed in
/etc/cups/printers.conf and displayed with 'lpstat -a'.
Now for the bad news! The remote server may not be broadcasting with the
Bonjour protocol but using the CUPS/IPP browsing protocol. cups knows
nothing whatsoever about this protocol so forget about it being able to
use or process information from the remote print queues. But, good news;
cups-browsed can come to the rescue. Please read its documentation and
check the setting for 'BrowseRemoteProtocols' in its configuration file,
/etc/cups/cups-browsed.conf. If it is 'CUPS dnssd' you have nothing to do.
Advertising your local queues
=============================
Your cups install (standard or not) automatically uses only the Bonjour
protocol to advertise any print queues you choose to share. Sharing
print queues may be done either by
* setting 'Browsing' to 'On' or 'Off' in /etc/cups/cusd.conf
or
* Using the Administration section of the web interface
Having done this, finer control over individual print queues can be
achieved in /etc/cups/printers.conf with 'Shared' as 'On' or 'Off' for
chosen printers. Alternatively, a print queue can be modified from the
Printers section of the web interface.
Ok, you have chosen to share; everything is now alright? Not quite! A
1.6.x machine listening to your Bonjour broadcasts will be capable of
processing them with the aid of cups-browsed but a 1.5.x (or older)
machine will not be. This is because it usually does not have
cups-browsed available to install so can only process CUPS/IPP protocol
broadcasts. But, once again, cups-browsed on your machine can help your
cups daemon out. Please read its documentation.
Socket-activation under systemd
========================================
Since 1.7.1-7, when systemd is the active init system, CUPS can be
configured to be socket-activated; it will then only be launched on accesses to
its sockets. The socket definition in /lib/systemd/system/cups.socket gets
configured through files in /etc/systemd/system/cups.socket.d/; see
systemd.unit(5) and the examples files in /usr/share/doc/cups-daemon/examples .
CUPS opens its listening ports based on 'Port' and 'Listen' stanzas in
/etc/cups/cupsd.conf. For systemd's socket activation to working, cups.socket
needs to be configured to listen to the correct IPs and aports by dropping
configuration files in the /etc/systemd/system/cups.socket.d/ directory.
When launched by socket-activation, CUPS can additionally exit itself after
being idle for some time (30 seconds by default) by using 'SystemdIdleExit on'
in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf'. The delay before exiting on idle can be configured
using 'IdleExitTimeout' in that same file.
Printing without using a local cups daemon
==========================================
For this to be possible you need to have permission to access a remote
server and to have at least cups-client installed. The cups and
cups-daemon packages are not required. The documentation for cups and
client.conf(5) should be sufficient to guide you further.
LPD support.
============
The BSD commands are separated into their own package, cups-bsd, whereas
the cups-lpd daemon is in the cups package. The hope is to make it
possible to have cups and some other BSD-style printing system (such as
lpr) side-by-side for testing purposes. However, it's known that cups
conflicts with LPRng, since LPRng provides some System V printing commands
as well; this problem will (hopefully) be dealt with in time.
The cups-lpd daemon is disabled by default. To enable it install cups-bsd
and update-inetd; then run:
dpkg-reconfigure cups-bsd
and follow the prompts. You will need a compatible inetd daemon installed
(not xinetd).
When using the LPD support provided by cups-bsd you need to ensure
debconf knows that you want LPD support enabled, otherwise LPD support
will be disabled when you upgrade cups-bsd. To check, install
debconf-utils and execute:
debconf-get-selections | grep setuplpd
The command should return:
cups-bsd cups-bsd/setuplpd boolean true
Integration with Samba
======================
It is possible to configure Samba to share cups' print queues with
Microsoft clients. There are two ways to do this:
1. Recent versions of Samba, including Debian's, have direct cups
support. You can configure Samba as follows:
[global]
printing = cups
printcap name = cups
2. If, for some reason, you don't want to use Samba's native cups support
you can configure Samba to use System V printing. This can be done by
adding the following information to /etc/samba/smb.conf.
[global]
printing = sysv
printcap name = lpstat
[printers]
lpq command = /usr/bin/lpstat %p
lprm command = /usr/bin/cancel %p-%j
print command = /usr/bin/lp -d%p -oraw %s ; /bin/rm -f %s
This method will require installation of the cups-client package.
For more tips on integration with Samba check out the man page for
cupsaddsmb, which is part of the cups-client package.
Reporting bugs
==============
Please see /usr/share/doc/cups/HOWTO_BUGREPORT.txt.
This document is based on the one originally written by
Jeff Licquia <licquia@debian.org> and Kenshi Muto <kmuto@debian.org>
and has been updated by Brian Potkin to reflect changes in the Debian
printing system during the intervening period.
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