2 - Raspberry PI Community Projects

8.7. Printer Configuration
Printer configuration used to cause a great many headaches for administrators and users alike.
These headaches are now mostly a thing of the past, thanks to the creation of cups, the free print
server using the IPP protocol (Internet Printing Protocol).
This program is divided over several Debian packages: cups is the central print server; cups-bsd
is a compatibility layer allowing use of commands from the traditional BSD printing system (lpd
daemon, lpr and lpq commands, etc.); cups-client contains a group of programs to interact with
the server (block or unblock a printer, view or delete print jobs in progress, etc.); and finally,
cups-driver-gutenprint contains a collection of additional printer drivers for cups.
COMMUNITY
CUPS
CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) is a trademark filed by the Easy Soware
Products company, when cups was created.
➨ http://www.easysw.com/
NOTE
CUPS and CUPSYS
The packages containing cups are currently called cups, cups-client, cups-bsd,
etc. In the Debian versions before Lenny, the packages had names built on
the basis of cupsys. You may still find transition packages installed on some
relatively old machines that have been updated over time.
After installation of these different packages, cups is administered easily through a web interface
accessible at the local address: hp://localhost:631/. There you can add printers (including
network printers), remove, and administer them. You can also administer cups with
the system-config-printer graphical interface (from the Debian package of the same name),
which is installed by default if the “Desktop environment” task is chosen.
NOTE
Obsolescence of /etc/
printcap
cups no longer uses the /etc/printcap file, which is now obsolete. Programs
that rely upon this file to get a list of available printers will, thus, fail. To avoid
this problem, delete this file and make it a symbolic link (see sidebar “Symbolic
links” (page 167)) to /var/run/cups/printcap, which is maintained by
cups to ensure compatibility.
8.8. Configuring the Bootloader
It is probably already functional, but it is always good to know how to configure and install the
bootloader in case it disappears from the Master Boot Record. This can occur after installation
of another operating system, such as Windows. The following information can also help you to
modify the bootloader configuration if needed.
160 The Debian Administrator's Handbook