CUPS
CUPS stands for the Common UNIX Printing System. It is a system that allows you to manage, add, and control printers on your computer, and even on other computers on your network. CUPS makes it very easy to maintain printers. Although you don’t have to use CUPS to add and manage your printers, it’s often useful because it provides a nice interface for doing so.
This exercise will cover the basics of CUPS, but if you’d like to dive in deeper, there’s a wonderful help section available on the CUPS page that provides more information. The CUPS interface is accessed from any Web browser. Let’s take a look!
1. Open Safari, type localhost:631. in the Address bar, and press Return on your keyboard. The CUPS home page appears. The CUPS home page provides quick access to information and features of the CUPS system.
The CUPS home page.
2. Click the Administration tab at the top of the page. This section provides a convenient way to add printers, add classes (printer pools), and manage jobs. It also provides a way for you to share printers and control what users can do with jobs in the print queue.
3. Click the Classes tab at the top of the page. The printer pool that you added earlier in this article is displayed here.
4. Click the name of the printer pool (Snow_Leopard_Pool), and you see additional options that are available for managing this pool, such as seeing what jobs have been completed.
5. Click the Online Help tab at the top of the page. If you want to know the answer to certain questions about CUPS or simply want more information, you can find it here.
6. Click the Jobs tab at the top of the page. This displays any jobs in any of the Print Queues on your computer.
7. Click the Show Completed Jobs button in the upper-left corner of the page. All jobs that have been printed are listed with very detailed information, such as the user who printed the job, when it was printed, and what the name of the job was. Very useful!
8. Click the Printers tab at the top of the page. This displays all the printers installed on your computer. Click the name of the first printer in this list to display more detailed information about the printer.
Detailed information about each printer is displayed on the CUPS page.
9. Click the Maintenance drop-down menu. From this menu, you can use all of the features that you could from within the Print & Fax preference pane, and then some. Choose the Print Test Page option. A test page prints on your printer and the CUPS Web page refreshes to show you the status of the print job. This menu also allows you to perform functions such as cleaning the print head, cancelling jobs, moving jobs to another printer, and much more.
10. Choose Safari > Quit Safari. CUPS makes managing either a single or multiple printers a very easy process. The ability to manually move a job from one printer to another is a great feature if you don’t have a printer pool configured and are waiting for another job to finish printing. You can also pause and resume any printer as needed.