9.1. Red Hat
9.1. Red Hat
Red Hat has a GUI printer administration tool called printtool
which can add remote printers and printers on local devices. It
lets you choose a ghostscript-supported printer type and Unix
device file to print to, then installs a print queue in/etc/printcap and uses a filter program from
the rhs-printfilters package to support postscript and other
common input types. This solution works fairly well, and is
trivial to setup for common cases.
Red Hat 6.x shipped a BSD LPD flavor; Red Hat 7.x and 8.0 appear to
default to using LPRng.
Where Red Hat 6.x and 7.x fail is when you have a printer which isn't
supported by their standard Ghostscript (which is GNU rather than
Aladdin Ghostscript, and which supports fewer printers). Check in
the printer compatibility list above (or online) if you find that you can't print properly with the stock Red
Hat software. If your printer isn't supported by Red Hat's tools,
you may need to install a contributed venison of Aladdin
Ghostscript, and will probably also be better off if you use the
lpdomatic or apsfilter packages, which know all about the printers
supported by late-model Ghostscripts, and others besides.
Red Hat 8.0 still installs LPRng by default although you can select CUPS. But even if you explicitly select only CUPS, LPRng is still installed. In Red Hat 8.1 CUPS will finally be the default spooler.
Red Hat 9.0 finally uses CUPS as default spooler.
