Red Hat Linux 7 Unleashed

By William Ball

• Table of Contents
  • Copyright
  • About the Lead Authors
  • About the Contributing Authors
  • Acknowledgments
  • Tell Us What You Think!
  • Introduction
  • I. Red Hat Linux Installation and User Services
  • Chapter 1. Introduction to Red Hat Linux
  • Chapter 2. Installation of Your Red Hat System
  • Chapter 3. LILO and Other Boot Managers
  • Chapter 4. Configuring the X Window System, Version 11
  • Chapter 5. Window Managers
  • Chapter 6. Connecting to the Internet
  • Chapter 7. IRC, ICQ, and Chat Clients
  • Chapter 8. Using Multimedia and Graphics Clients
  • II. Configuring Services
  • Chapter 9. System Startup and Shutdown
  • Chapter 10. SMTP and Protocols
  • Chapter 11. FTP
  • Chapter 12. Apache Server
  • Chapter 13. Internet News
  • Chapter 14. Domain Name Service and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
  • Chapter 15. NIS: Network Information Service
  • Chapter 16. NFS: Network Filesystem
  • Chapter 17. Samba
  • III. System Administration and Management
  • Chapter 18. Linux Filesystems, Disks, and Other Devices
  • Chapter 19. Printing with Linux
    • Printer Devices
    • What Printer Should I Use with Linux?
    • How Do I Print?
    • printtool The Red Hat Linux Print System Manager
    • Linux Printing Commands
    • Other Helpful Printer Programs and Filters
    • Infrared Printer Support
    • Other Helpful Programs
    • Troubleshooting and More Information
    • Summary
  • Chapter 20. TCP/IP Network Management
  • Chapter 21. Linux System Administration
  • Chapter 22. Backup and Restore
  • Chapter 23. System Security
  • IV. Red Hat Development and Productivity
  • Chapter 24. Linux C/C++ Programming Tools
  • Chapter 25. Shell Scripting
  • Chapter 26. Automating Tasks
  • Chapter 27. Configuring and Building Kernels
  • Chapter 28. Emulators, Tools, and Window Clients
  • V. Appendixes
  • A. The Linux Documentation Project
  • B. Top Linux Commands and Utilities
  • C. The GNU General Public License
  • D. Red Hat Linux RPM Package Listings

Printer Devices

Under Linux, each piece of your computer's hardware is abstracted to a device file (hopefully with an accompanying device driver in the kernel; see Chapter 18, "Linux Filesystems, Disks, and Other Devices," for more details). Printer devices, traditionally named after line printers, are character mode devices and will be found in the /dev directory. Some of these devices, along with the traditional hardware port assignments, are shown in Table 19.1.

Table 19.1. Parallel Printer Devices

Serial printers are assigned to serial devices, such as /dev/ttySX, where X is a number from 0 to 3. Quite a few tty devices are listed in /dev. Generally, if you're going to use a serial printer, you have to use the setserial command to make sure the printer's serial port is set to the fastest baud rate your printer supports.

In some special cases, such as using an old Apple LaserWriter as a serial printer (it has a Diablo print-wheel emulation mode using the Courier font), you must define your own printer or edit an entry in the /etc/printcap database. Sometimes you can manipulate the printer to get a higher speed. For example, here's a 10-year-old trick, posted to the comp.laser-printers newsgroup by Dale Carstensen, for increasing the serial port speed of the Apple LaserWriter Plus to 19200:

%!
0000 % Server Password
statusdict begin 25 sccbatch 0 ne exch 19200 ne or
{ serverdict begin exitserver} {pop end stop} ifelse
statusdict begin
25 19200 0 setsccbatch
end % noteÑnext line has an actual CTRL-D

See Appendix D in the RedBook, Adobe's PostScript language reference manual, for more information about LaserWriters, or peruse comp.laser-printers for hints on setting up your laser printer. Also read the file Psfiles.htm under the /usr/share/ghostscript/5.50 directory for information about the numerous PostScript printer utilities included in the Ghostscript distribution.

Most desktop users, however, have a printer attached to the parallel printer port, so I'll first concentrate on /dev/lp.

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