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.