System Administration Guide

Printing in the Solaris 2.6 Environment

The Solaris 2.6 printing software provides an environment for setting up and managing client access to printers on a network.

The Solaris 2.6 printing software contains these components:

SunSoft Print Client software, previously only available with the Solstice^TM AdminSuite^TM set of administration tools, provides the ability to make printers available to print clients via a name service.
Admintool, a graphical user interface used to manage printing on a local system.
The LP print service commands, a command line interface used to set up and manage printers that also provides functionality above and beyond the other print management tools.
The Solstice AdminSuite Print Manager, a graphical user interface used to manage printers in a name service environment, is available with the Solaris 2.6 server product.

Table 39-2 summarizes the features of the Solaris 2.6 printing components.

Table 39-2 Solaris 2.6 Printing Component Features


Component	Graphical User Interface?	Set Up Print Clients?	Manage Print Clients and Servers?	Using NIS or NIS+?
SunSoft Print Client	No	Yes	No	Yes
Admintool	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
LP commands	No	Yes	Yes	No
Solstice AdminSuite	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Note -

If you do not use Solstice Printer Manager to set up and manage printing, you will have to use some combination of the other components to completely manage printing in the Solaris 2.6 environment.

Choosing a Method to Manage Printers

The Solaris 2.6 print client software and the Printer Manager application in Solstice^TM AdminSuite^TM offer a graphical solution for setting up and managing printers on a network. The advantage of the Solaris 2.6 print client software is that it supports a name service (NIS or NIS+), which enables you to centralize print administration for a network. lpadmin can also be used on the command line to configure printers on individual systems.

Admintool(TM) provides an alternative method to install printers in the Solaris environment. Admintool is a graphical user interface that simplifies tasks for setting up and managing printers. See Chapter 41, Setting Up Printers (Tasks) for step-by-step instructions on using Admintool.

You must run Admintool on the system to which you have attached the printer, because Admintool does not enable you to make changes to a remote system. When setting up a printer, Admintool makes the appropriate changes in the system's /etc/printers.conf and /etc/lp directory as required. You can use Admintool to set up a system as a print server or print client only if it is running the SunOS 5.x operating system. Setting up SunOS 4.x print servers and clients is fully described in the SunOS 4.x documentation.

Most of your needs for setting up printing services should be met by Admintool. However, if you have special needs, such as writing scripts, you may want to use the LP print service commands (which underlie Admintool) directly. The setup process with commands is described in "How to Add Access on the Print Client using LP Commands".

Use Table 39-3 to find printer setup information.

Table 39-3 Where To Find Printer Setup Information


For Information On ...	See ...
Setting up print clients and print servers using Admintool	Chapter 41, Setting Up Printers (Tasks)
Setting up printer information available to print clients using a name service	Chapter 41, Setting Up Printers (Tasks)
Setting up network printers using the LP commands	Chapter 41, Setting Up Printers (Tasks)
Setting and managing printing (including network printers) using Solstice Printer Manager	Solstice AdminSuite 2.3 Administration Guide
Administering printers using the LP commands	Chapter 42, Administering Printers (Tasks)