The Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) can be installed or in many cases comes preinstalled on Unix/Linux systems. It provides printer support that is much better than the traditional Unix BSD printer support, with drivers for many printers, the ability to print everything as postscript (through automatic conversion), and Web-based configuration and adminstration of the printers. As Ina would say, "What's not to like?"
Additionally, CUPS can access networked printers that are shared through network print servers (such as Lantronix or Netprint) and can make any of its printers available to Windows/SMB clients via Samba shares. These notes describe how we set up CUPS to access networked printers and how we go about sharing them to Windows. Printers may also be locally attached to the CUPS server and shared in a similar manner via Samba.
Once you've either installed and configured CUPS, or configured the pre-installed version of CUPS that came with your OS, launch the CUPS UI via your Web browser. The first time around, you will need to do this directly from a Web browser on the machine where CUPS is installed, and use the hostname localhost:
http://localhost:631
When you have the UI up and running, you can allow other machines to remotely administer CUPS by clicking the Administration tab and checking the "Allow remote administration" check box. Otherwise, you will always have to administer CUPS from localhost.
All of the administration functions, such as adding printers, are carried out from the Administration page so begin by picking the "Administration" tab.
The next step is to tell CUPS about your printers so that it can manage printing on them. The best way to show how this is done is to proceed with a few examples. In our first example, we'll add a networked postscript printer that is connected to the network via a print server that uses the LPD protocol. We'll begin by clicking the "Add Printer" button and then filling in the form that follows.
On earlier versions of CUPS, the printer information was filled out first and then the device type and connection information was supplied. The latest versions of CUPS (e.g. 6.x and 7.x) do it the other way around so we start by picking the device type. Since we wish to set up the printer on a print server that uses the LPD protocol to print Postscript jobs, we'll proceed as follows:
| Other Network Printers: LPD/LPR Host or Printer | from dropdown list |
After selecting "LPD/LPR Host or Printer" and clicking the "Continue" button:
| Connection: lpd://kinkos/Laser | Note: this example is for a Lantronix EPS-2 which has a queue called "Laser" on Port_2. You get the IP number and queue name from the server's setup but you should always use the prefix "lpd://". |
After clicking the "Continue" button a second time on later versions of CUPS or immediately after adding the new printer on earlier versions, we fill out the form with the printer's information:
Printer Name: Laser
Location: Office
Description: NEC Silentwriter 95 LASER printer
| Sharing: Share this printer | Note: if this option is available, you'll probably want to check it so that CUPS can share the printer via SMB. |
On earlier versions of CUPS, we now click "Continue" and then pick the device type as follows:
| Device: LPD/LPR server | from dropdown list |
| URI: lpd://kinkos/Laser | Note: this example is for a Lantronix EPS-2 which has a queue called "Laser" on Port_2. You get the IP number and queue name from the server's setup but you should always use the prefix "lpd://". |
Make: Postscript
Model: Generic postscript printer
After all of the information is filled in, one way or another, click "Continue" to set up the printer.
In our second example, we'll set up a line printer that uses the Raw protocol to print ASCII text, without modification (e.g. Genicom, DataProducts). We'll begin by clicking the "Add Printer" button and then filling in the relevant data, as described in the first example:
Printer Name: Line Printer
Location: Data Processing
Description: DataProducts high speed line printer
| Device: AppSocet/JetDirect | from dropdown list |
| URI: socket://10.100.0.20:10001/PORT1 | Note: this example is for a NetPrint 500/100 which uses port 10001 (by default) and has a queue name of PORT1 (by default) You get the IP number, port number and queue name from the server's setup but you should always use the prefix "socket://". |
Make: Raw
Model: Raw queue
For each printer, you may want to test its printing capabilities after it is set up, by clicking the "Printers" tab and then clicking its "Print Test Page" button or selecting "Print Test Page" from the dropdown list (as appropriate for your version of CUPS).
Once you have set up all your printers, you should select one of them as the default, by clicking the "Printers" tab and then clicking the "Set As Default" button or selecting "Set As Server Default" from the dropdown list for the printer that you wish to be the default. You can test the default print setting by using the lpr command from the command prompt to print a small text file:
lpr conf/cupsd.conf
By the way, if the print job doesn't immediately appear on the printer but is queued instead, you might want to go to the Web UI and, under the "Printers" tab, click "Resume Printer" or selct "Resume Printer" from the dropdown list. For some reason, CUPS seems to want to gratuitously pause printers on its own.
Samba can be used to make all of the printers, that are configured under CUPS, available to Windows/SMB clients. If the printer is a postscript printer, it simply needs to be shared by Samba, at which point it can be easily utilized by any Windows/SMB clients using the regular driver for that printer.
If your printer requires some kind of special driver (e.g. one of those cheap ink-dispensers, ooops, we meant inkjet printers, like the Canon printers), you will need to set up a generic postscript driver that can be used by any printer client to create the output that is to be spooled to CUPS. Once that is done and the printer is defined under Samba, it can be likewise utilized by any Windows/SMB client that wishes to use it.
If it wasn't obvious from the above preamble, most of the printer setup involves dealing with the device drivers needed to produce postscript output that can be printed by CUPS. In the old days, we used to begin this little odyssey by getting the generic CUPS postscript drivers from the CUPS Web site (under the "Download" tab, you'd see the "Windows Driver" downloads, which include the "cups-windows-6.0" tarball). Although it wss billed as source, the tarball also included precompiled DLLs. Once you'd downloaded it, you could untar the files and extract the CUPS postscript drivers:
tar -xvzf cups-windows-6.0-source.tar.gz
Since the Fruit Company has taken over development of CUPS, the "Windows Driver" downloads have disappeared. We leave speculation as to why this is to you conspiracy theorists and the lawyers in the Justice Department Antitrust Division. Suffice to say, "They're gone baby."
Fortunately, there are still copies of the drivers available on the Web, including our copy right here: cups-windows-drivers-6.0.tar.gz.
Once you'd downloaded our drivers file, you can untar the drivers themselves like this:
tar -xvzf cups-windows-drivers-6.0.tar.gz
Incidentally, if you download our drivers file, you'll also get the patches to the cups6.ppd files that change the driver name to something a little better suited to general use and make them work on 64-bit machines.
An alternative to downloading our CUPS drivers file is: http://www.helixstorm.com/sambacifsadcupsx86x64-windows-drivers/. If you choose to download this file, you'll also get the appropriate Windows postscript drivers (so you can skip the "get them from Windows" steps below) but you might still want to get our drivers file and substitute the cups6.ppd files therein.
Create a drivers directory (under your CUPS install directory — note that this is a different directory than the "driver" directory that is found in the CUPS library path) for the driver files and copy them into it:
cd cups-windows-drivers-6.0 or cups-windows-6.0
su
mkdir /usr/share/cups/drivers
cp i386/* /usr/share/cups/drivers
mkdir /usr/share/cups/drivers/x64
cp x64/* /usr/share/cups/drivers/x64
Now, the CUPS postscript drivers also depend on the Windows postscript drivers and the cupsaddsmb command on some versions of CUPS has a bug in it whereby it loops endlessly if the Windows postscript drivers cannot be found. To get them, you must go to a version of Windows 2000, XP, 2003 Server, Vista, 2008 Server or 7 and copy the required files. If you are using Samba, this should be a snap for the 32-bit drivers. The directory to look in is:
| C:\WINNT\system32\spool\drivers\w32x86\3 | for Windows 2000 |
| C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\drivers\w32x86\3 | for Windows XP |
| C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\drivers\w32x86\3 | for 32-bit Windows Vista |
Under Windows 7, the 64-bit postscript drivers are locked up in a cabinet file and need to be extracted before they can be used. To extract them, you need to actually be on the Windows 7 machine where you do the following:
Launch a command window with "Run as administrator" checked. You should be able to do this by right clicking on the "Command Window" icon in the "Start" menu or from the "All Programs" menu. When the dropdown list pops up, you'll set the adminstrator choice there.
expand C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\x64\PCC\ntprint.inf* -f:* destdir
Copy the extracted drivers from destdir.
Windows 2003 Server or 2008 Server are left as an exercise to the reader (you're supposed to be a sysadmin, aren't you?) but they should be pretty similar to Windows XP or 7.
The four files that you want for both 32-bit and 64-bit are:
ps5ui.dll
pscript.hlp
pscript.ntf
pscript5.dll
Also, the same buggy cupsaddsmb wants to use lowercase names for these drivers but some of the files may have uppercase names. Windoze doesn't care but Unix/Linux sure does. So, lowercase all the names before proceeding, if necessary.
Once you have these four (or eight, if you also went for the 64-bit) files with lowercase names, copy them to the drivers directory that you created above:
su
cd WindowsPSDrivers/i386
cp ps5ui.dll pscript.hlp pscript.ntf pscript5.dll /usr/share/cups/drivers
cd WindowsPSDrivers/x64
cp ps5ui.dll pscript.hlp pscript.ntf pscript5.dll /usr/share/cups/drivers/x64
chmod u-x /usr/share/cups/drivers/*
chmod u-x /usr/share/cups/drivers/x64/*
Add the printers definition information to the Samba config file. You'll have to figure out where to actually put the information but it should look something like this:
[global]
[printers]
[print$]
Be sure to check that the "cups options = raw" parameter is not
present in the global options section of the config file or, if it is, it is
commented out. Some of the later default Samba config files have this
parameter set.
If the installed version of Samba, on your system, wasn't
compiled against a version of libcups.so that will enumerate the printers for
it, or if you didn't compile Samba against such a version of libcups.so (this
could happen if CUPS wasn't installed on your system when you built Samba,
for example), the supposedly-preferred "printcap name = cups" thing won't
work. However, since CUPS exports all of its printer definitions to
printcap automagically, you should be able to use
"printcap name = /etc/printcap". In this case, be sure that the cupsd.conf
configuration file has these two directives set:
Printcap /etc/printcap
Also, there's a bug in some versions of Samba that causes
printers not to be handled properly if the permissions of the user looking at
the printer are not those of the printer administrator. The upshot of this
is that the printer will appear to Winduhs as "permission denied", although
the user will be able to print to the printer. Unfortunately, this precludes
the user from setting up the printer, since Windoze will not proceed past the
first step, once the printer is selected. The kludge is to add all of the
users who will be setting up a printer to the following line for the
"[printers]" or individual printer definiton:
printer admin = root, user1, user2, ...
Once the printer has been set up, the user names can be
removed from the list. The users will get the annoying "permission denied"
message but will still be able to print.
Be aware that, under versions of Samba from 3.x and above,
"printer admin" is deprecated and probably should be left out of the
configuration file (allthough we've been leaving it in with no adverse
consequences so far). If the above problem still exists in your version of
Samba 3.x, the following "[global]" option is reported to fix things:
use client driver = Yes
Finally, run the cupsaddsmb command to export the postscript
printer drivers and the printer PPDs for all of the installed printers to
Samba:
su
Or, if you prefer, you can run this cupsaddsmb command to
export the postscript printer drivers and the printer PPD for an individual
printer:
su
Note that you must supply the name of the Samba server
(despite what the man page for cubsaddsmb says) or the command seems to fail.
Also, you will be prompted for the root password under Samba (this may be
different than your system's root password). Don't even think of running
this command without the "-v" option. Under some Samba versions, it is so
buggy and it loops endlessly if there's any error from Samba, that you'll
want to see exactly what is going on.
Even more fun is that, under some versions of Samba, this
command bombs out while doing rpcclient. We suspect it is a problem with
rpcclient, whereby it does not properly handle logins using a username file,
supplied via the "-A" option in the cupsaddsmb code. Anyway, if cubsaddsmb
gets an NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE while trying to run rpcclient to register
the newly-added driver (and loops endlessly), you can run the rpcclient
command yourself. Simply cut and paste the failed command from the error
message and run it directly, after removing the "-N" and "-A" options and
substituting "-U root". It should look something like:
rpcclient localhost -U root -c 'adddriver "Windows NT x86" \
Then, you will need to manually connect the driver to the
printer by running the setdriver command, which will look something like
this:
rpcclient localhost -U root -c 'setdriver Photo Photo'
In the setdriver command, the first name is the printer name
and the second is the driver name (as registered by adddriver). In this
example they are both the same but they can be different, if you want.
You can verify that the drivers are installed correctly and
that they are associated with the printer by doing something like this:
rpcclient localhost -U root -c 'enumdrivers 3'
Note that on at least one version of Samba, the enumdrivers
command segfaulted but the driver was still installed correctly. The
ultimate test is if the getprinter command shows the driver listed under
"drivername:". You may also be able to see what's going on with the drivers
by trying enumdrivers at a less detailed level. For example:
rpcclient localhost -U root -c 'enumdrivers 2'
For a more comprehensive description of how this works, you
can surf over to this URL:
http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/network_administration_guides/
To utilize the printer from Windows 2000, XP, 2003 Server,
2008 Server or 7, follow the SMB Print Server Setup instructions in the
Accessing a Print Server
notes. These notes show all of the steps that must be taken to get the
shared printer working from the Windows client side.
Meanwhile, if you find all of the tap dancing described
above, needed to use the proper driver for your particular printer, not to
your liking, and you just want simple, straightforward postscript printing,
you can define your printer something like this in your Samba configuration
file:
[Laser]
Note that you may have to figure out the appropriate print
command for printing on your system. The example above uses one of the
Berkeley lpr-type commands to print on the default printer. The
Samba docs
are helpful.
If the printer requires any kind of driver, you will have to
either install it on each client machine that uses the printer or mark the
printer as a raw device on each client. Simple printing of straight text
files should work but getting printing of any kind of postscript documents
working may be more fun than it is worth. CUPS will probably try to monkey
with the output, since it thinks it knows how the device should work, based
on its installation on the CUPS server, and it may even double convert the
document to postscript/postscript. Setting up a separate raw printer
on the CUPS server, which will just spool the output formatted by the drivers
on the client systems, without modification, straight to the printer, may
prove the best method.
Once the printer is set up how you like it, add the printer
(as described in the SMB Print Server Setup instructions in the
Accessing a Print Server
notes). If your printer requires postscript, pick a standard driver file
from the list of already-supported drivers for any postscript printer such
as the HP LaserJet 5P/5MP PostScript printer. All postscript printers use
the same Microsoft postscript engine so anything that you choose should work.
If you have a printer that is a total pain in the butt (like
the Canon BubbleJet series printers), but you none-the-less have a
non-postscript Windows driver for it, you can set up a RAW printer queue
under CUPS and use it to send output to the printer. To do this, make the
following choices when setting up the printer:
Make: Raw
Model: Raw queue
Then, on Windows, install the printer as described in the
SMB Print Server Setup instructions in the
Accessing a Print Server
notes but, when it comes time to install the drivers, pick the proper driver
from the list of standard drivers or install the one supplied by the
manufacturer. You should be able to print to the printer but all bets are
off as to whether CUPS will correctly handle the interaction between the two
printer queues, if simultaneous print requests from the Unix/Linix side and
the Winddoze side are received at once.
load printers = yes
; cups options = raw
printing = cups
printcap name = /etc/printcap
comment = All Printers
path = /var/spool/samba
browseable = no
public = yes
guest ok = yes
writable = no
printable = yes
printer admin = root
comment = Printer Drivers
path = /etc/samba/drivers
browseable = yes
guest ok = no
read only = yes
write list = root
PrintcapFormat BSD
mkdir /etc/samba/drivers
/usr/sbin/cupsaddsmb -H localhost -U root -a -v
mkdir /etc/samba/drivers
/usr/sbin/cupsaddsmb -H localhost -U root -v Photo
"Photo:pscript5.dll:Photo.ppd:ps5ui.dll:pscript.hlp:NULL:RAW:\
pscript5.dll,Photo.ppd,ps5ui.dll,pscript.hlp,pscript.ntf,\
cups6.ini,cupsps6.dll,cupsui6.dll"'
rpcclient localhost -U root -c 'getprinter Photo 2'
samba_reference_guide/29_CUPS-printing_105.html
printable = yes
print command = /usr/bin/lpr -P%p -r %s
printer = Laser
printing = BSD
path = /var/tmp
browseable = no
public = yes
writable = no
printable = yes
printer admin = root
Raw Printers