The CUPS Printing System    Sunday, October 23 2005 @ 06:20 PM EDT Contributed by: sde A basic introduction to what CUPS is and why you might want to use it rather than LPD. CUPS is what its name says: a common UNIX printing system. It is aimed at providing a common printing interface across a local network, masking differences among the printing systems on each computer. I am not sure that such a system is needed in a pure Linux environment, where the standard Berkely LPD provides this functionality, but CUPS does provide interactivity with SMB and Windows printers. CUPS also allows dynamic printer detection and grouping. CUPS is licensed under the GPL by a company called Easy Software Products. Besides providing CUPS itself as free software, the company also provides commercial add-ons and support. You can get CUPS from www.cups.org, and it is available as an RPM package for most distributions. I've seen it for Mandrake, Red Hat and SuSE. CUPS can be seen as a replacement for the LPD printing system. It replaces the lpr command with its own and the LPD printer drivers with its own versions. However, CUPS is similar to LPD in that it uses PostScript as its underlying language for page descriptions. Linux (and UNIX) programs don't know the difference between CUPS and LPD. Full article   [ Views: 2009 ]

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