Linux Printer Help

Introduction

The Linux Printer Package is an integrated suite of utilities for the Linux operating system, allowing you to configure and manage Linux printers in a user-friendly way.

This package supports all common printing systems, including variants of LPD (BSD, LPRng, ...) and the new Common Unix Printing System (CUPS).

Usage

The Linux Printer Package is made of the following components :

The Configuration Tool

LLPR, a replacement for the 'lpr' command.

These programs are depending on the GTK libraries (version 1.2 or higher) to function properly. Before you can run these tools, you will need to make sure the libraries are properly installed on your system. Most Linux distributions install these libraries by default, sometimes as part of the GNOME Desktop installation.

Removing the Linux Printer Package

You can uninstall this software by running linux-uninstall from a shell, or by choosing the Uninstall option from the configuration tool.

Troubleshooting

Printing System Notes

This section gives a few technical details for some of the printing systems supported by the Linux Printer Package.

LPD variants (including LPRng)

Printers configured by this package are able to recognize extended command-line options, that can be passed to lpr or lp (consult your system documentation to find out the exact syntax).

Most of these options are compatible with similar options offered by the CUPS printing system. A detailed reference of standard CUPS printing options is available at this link.

All CUPS options are supported on the LLPR command line, and can be specified with the -o flag. For example:

llpr -o landscape document.ps

The CUPS options that are not handled by LLPR and that are available on the command line for regular printing tools are the following :

media, landscape, number-up, orientation-requested, Collate, OutputOrder, sides, job-sheets, page-ranges, page-set, brightness, gamma, raw

Please note that due to some restrictions on the way options are passed in LPRng systems, the syntax of the job-sheets and media options is slightly different: instead of separating the elements of these options with commas (,), they have to be separated with underscores (_).

For instance: use job-sheets=none_secret instead of job-sheets=none,secret as it would be used with CUPS.

The Linux Printer Package also recognizes the num-copies option, which is used to specify the number of copies of the print job to be produced. For Linux printers, it should be used instead of the regular lpr options (-K or -#), as it allows to enable collating.

For example, this command prints 3 copies and enables collating:
lpr -Z num-copies=3 -Z Collate=true document.ps