Skip to Main Content

Department of Computer Science

Technical Services and Support

Printing on Linux

by Hanz Makmur – Oct 2009
 

These instruction will show you how to print to Computer Science public printers.The first section is for LCSR maintained machines and second is for user maintained machines. See list of available CS printers for more details info.

1. Setting Up Printing from CUPS on Linux
 
By default all print jobs will print with a header/banner page. If you have private printer or plan to print to any color or poster printers, you should turn off the banner page printed before each job.

Other Linux/Unix machines not maintained by LCSR staff may have their own printing engine. These machines are normally administered by the user and beyond the control of LCSR staff. For these machines, the simplest way to print to Computer Science printers is as follow the following:

    1. Install cups software for your Linux OS.
    2. Edit or add if one does not exist a file named  /etc/cups/client.conf and enter this line and save it.
      ServerName printserver.cs.rutgers.edu

      After your restart your CUPSD, you can print to all printers available on printserver.cs.rutgers.edu.

    3. Verifying your setup:
      To see a list of available printer queues, type  lpstat -p
      To check specific printer queue type:  lpq -P printername.
    4. To set your default printer to printer named: cbim_printer_1 in Linux bash shell, type:
      export PRINTER=cbim_printer_1   or add this line to your .bashrc file so that you don’t have to do it again after you logout.
2. Printing from Linux/Unix.

Once you have setup your linux printer queue, to print you would need to issue standard print command from your application.

To print from a Unix shell, normally you would enter:

lpr -P printername filename

To print without banner page, enter the following command

lpr -h -P printeraname filename

To print in single sided on printers defaulting in duplex , you would enter:

lpr -P printername -o sides=one-sided filename

There are a lot options you can set with CUPS driver. See CUPS printing options for further details. CUPS options do not work with SunOS machines.

For more info see list of Computer Science Public Printers page.

For help with our systems or If you need immediate assistant, visit LCSR Operator at CoRE 235 or call 848-445-2443. Otherwise, see CS HelpDesk. Don’t forget to include your NetID along with descriptions of your problem.