Setting Up Your Printing Environment to Work With CUPS

In previous Oracle Solaris releases, the LP print service was the default print service. Starting with the Oracle Solaris 11 release, the LP print service is removed. The default and only available print service in Oracle Solaris 11 is CUPS. If you are performing a fresh installation of Oracle Solaris 11 and have any existing printers that were configured by using the LP print service, you need to reconfigure those printers by using CUPS after the installation.

If you are upgrading from Oracle Solaris 11 Express to Oracle Solaris 11, see How to Set Up Your Printing Environment.

Switching to the CUPS print environment has resulted in the following changes:

• Any existing printers that were configured by using the LP print service will no longer work and must be reconfigured.

  You can reconfigure printers by using any one of the following methods:

  • By using the lpadmin command. For information, see How to Set Up a Printer by Using the lpadmin Command.

  • By using the CUPS web browser interface at http://localhost:631/help. For information, see Setting Up and Administering Printers by Using the CUPS Web Browser Interface .

  • By using CUPS Print Manager. For information, see Setting Up Printers by Using CUPS Print Manager.

• Printer configuration that was previously stored in the NIS naming service is not used by CUPS. Administrators can share network printers that are configured by using the CUPS shared-printer feature. CUPS auto-discovers printers on a network and enables you to print to these printers without any manual configuration. For information about sharing printers by using CUPS Print Manager, see Remote Server Configuration

• Printers that are configured on a per-user basis in the ~/.printers file no longer work. Printer configuration is managed by using the CUPS web browser interface, the CUPS command-line utilities, or the CUPS Print Manager graphical user interface.

• In previous releases, the /etc/printers.conf file contained details about all of the printers that were added by using the LP print service. With the removal of the LP print service in the Oracle Solaris 11 OS, this file still exists under CUPS but contains a summary of the local print queues. After installing the OS, any information about printers that were previously configured by using lp print commands is removed. The resulting behavior is as though these printers were never configured on the system. Any existing printers must be reconfigured by using CUPS. You do not need to delete existing printers prior to reconfiguring these printers by using CUPS. For information about setting up your printing environment to work with CUPS, see How to Set Up Your Printing Environment.

How to Set Up Your Printing Environment

To transition your current printing environment to work with CUPS, you must reconfigure your existing printers.

1. Ensure that the cups/scheduler and the cups/in-lpd SMF services are online.

   $ svcs -a | grep cups/scheduler
   online 18:18:55 svc:/application/cups/scheduler:default
   
   $ svcs -a | grep cups/in-lpd
   online Sep_29 svc:/application/cups/in-lpd:default

2. To enable these services, type the following commands:

   # svcadm enable cups/scheduler
   # svcadm enable cups/in-lpd

3. Determine whether the printer/cups/system-config-printer package is installed on your system.

   $ pkg info print/cups/system-config-printer

   • If the package is already installed, configure your printer by using CUPS.

     Printers can be configured by using either the lpadmin command, or by using the CUPS web browser interface at http://localhost:631, or by using CUPS Print Manager, which is accessible in the desktop.

   • If the package is not installed, install the package.

     $ pkg install print/cups/system-config-printer

See Also

Additional CUPS documentation can be found at:

• http://www.cups.org/documentation.php

• http://www.cups.org/doc-1.1/sam.html

Next Steps

You can now configure printers by using CUPS. You can set a default printer by specifying either the LPDEST or PRINTER environment variables, or by using the lpoptions command. For instructions, see How to Set a Default Printer at the Command Line and Example 15-6.

Setting Up Your Printing Environment for an Upgrade

If you are running unmodified Oracle Solaris 11 Express, CUPS is already the default print service. If you upgrade to Oracle Solaris 11, you do not need to reconfigure any existing print queues by using CUPS. However, if you switched to the LP print service and configured printers by using the lp print commands, you must reconfigure these existing printers by using CUPS after the upgrade.

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Caution - If you are running the LP print service, ensure to back up your /etc/printers.conf file before upgrading, as the upgrade process removes this file.

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To determine which print service is enabled on your system, type the following command:

$ /usr/sbin/print-service -q

Reconfigure your existing printers by using any one of the methods that is described in this chapter.