cups

CUPS is a free implementation of the answer of the whole computing industry to the never-ending printing problem, the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP). "There is currently no universal standard for printing. Several protocols are in use, but each has limited applicability and none can be considered the prevalent one. This means that printer vendors have to implement and support a number of different protocols and protocol variants.

This article was first written in August 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/286).

In a networked infrastructure, with many workstations needing to print (or generate PDF or PS files, or send faxes), CUPS may help a lot, especially with its automatic network-browsing features. Let's see how to set that up.

CUPS Server

First, you probably want to setup a server to share printers.

This article was first written in June 2004 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/135).

To change the default printer when using GNOME, it is pretty easy, provided that you use CUPS and gnome-cups-manager. Go into the "Applications" menu, then "Desktop Preferences", and "System Tools" and click on "Printing". There, you have a list of all preconfigured printers on the system. Right-click on the one you want by default and click on the "Make Default" menu entry.

GNU/Linux is particularly adapted as file server for Microsoft Windows, MacOS (any version) and UNIX workstations.