Despite years of hype about the coming paperless office, printing has actually become more frequent and more complex as time has passed, not less so. Ordinary users now routinely print tens or even hundreds of pages a week, a significant fraction of which is high-end, photo-quality graphics.
Despite years of hype about the coming paperless office, printing has actually become more frequent and more complex as time has passed, not less so. Ordinary users now routinely print tens or even hundreds of pages a week, a significant fraction of which is high-end, photo-quality graphics.
Traditionally, Linux systems have used the BSD spooling system. However, some recent distributions are now providing the LPRng package as the default printing subsystem instead. LPRng is an enhanced version of the BSD print spooling system (the “ng” stands for “next generation”). It is available for virtually any Unix system.
In this month’s column, we will focus on the enhancements that LPRng provides over the standard BSD printing subsystem. The procedure for installing LPRng using a different spooling system is fairly simple and is well documented in the LPRng-HOWTO, which can be found online at http://www.lprng.com/LPRng-HOWTO/LPRng-HOWTO.html.
Enhancements of Standard Commands
LPRng changes and enhances the functions of many standard BSD printing-related commands. The most important of these (from an administrative point of view) are additional subcommands provided with the lpc administrative utility. We will consider a few of them in some examples.
To begin with, there are subcommands which can be used to hold and release individual print jobs:
# lpc hold picasso 10021 # lpc release picasso
The first command places the specified job in the picasso queue into a hold state, temporarily preventing it from printing. The second command releases all…
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