Common Unix Printing System (Cups); Overview; Before You Start; Installing Cups On The Unix Workstation - Xerox WorkCentre 7300 Series Administrator's Manual

Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS)

Overview

The Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) was created by Easy Software Products in 1998 as a modern
replacement for the Berkeley Line Printer Daemon (LPD) and AT&T Line Printer (LP) system designed in
the 1970's for printing text to line printers.
Currently available for downloading from a number of sources on the Internet, such as www.cups.org,
CUPS is offered in both source code and binary distributions.

Before You Start

Verify that IPP and Port 9100 are enabled at your device.
For instructions, refer to the IPP Configuration and Configure Port 9100 topics in the NOS Selection
section of this guide.

Installing CUPS on the UNIX workstation

The instructions for installing and building CUPS are contained in the CUPS Software Administrators
Manual, written and copyrighted by Easy Software Products and available for downloading at
www.cups.org/documentation.php. An Overview of the Common UNIX Printing System, Version 1.1 by
Easy Software is also available at this site.
A case history of the building and installation of CUPS source code on a FreeBSD 4.2 machine, is
described in the article entitled Using CUPS--the Common UNIX Printing System, by Ralph Krause,
available at www.cups.org, through the links/documentation/tutorials/BSD Today - Using CUPS selections.
Directory locations for the CUPS files, as described in this article, are the following:
Programs were copied to /usr/local/bin and usr/local/sbin.
Documentation was copied to /usr/local/share/docs/cups.
A directory called /usr/local/share/cups was created for various CUPS data files.
The configuration files were copied to /usr/local/etc/cups.
The binary distribution of CUPS is available in tar format with installation and removal scripts, as well as in
rpm and dpkg formats for RedHat and Debian versions of Linux. After logging into the workstation as root
(su) and downloading the appropriate files to the root directory, the CUPS installation process begins as
follows:
Tar format:
After untarring the files, run the installation script with ./cups.install (and press Enter).
RPM format:
rpm -e lpr
rpm -i cups-1.1-linux-M.m.n-intel.rpm (and press Enter).
Debian format:
dpkg -i cups-1.1-linux-M.m.n-intel.deb (and press Enter).
Note: RedHat Linux, versions 7.3 and newer, include CUPS support, so software downloading is
unnecessary. Also, CUPS is the default printing system used by Mandrake Linux.
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