Sams Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours		ContentsIndex
Hour 8: Printers		Previous HourNext Hour
Sections in this Chapter: Samba and Printing Automatic Printer Driver Installation Supported Printing Styles Printing from UNIX to Windows The [printers] Share Summary Printer-Related Parameters Q&A		Previous SectionNext Section

Supported Printing Styles

Samba uses the native operating system's printing commands to print a file sent to a print share. It also uses the other commands provided by the printing system to query the status of print queues and print jobs, pause print queues, restart print queues, and so on.

However, there are many different printing styles under UNIX. Apart from the original BSD and System V, which have different commands for performing printing related tasks, there is also PLP (Portable Line Printer) and LPRNG, each of which take a BSD approach with improvements. Both PLP and LPRNG were developed by the same author, Patrick Powell.

As well as the printing styles, the popular UNIX variants AIX and HPUX have their own printing styles. In addition, Samba supports printing for QNX and SOFTQ.

When Samba is compiled, it sets the default printing style by checking for macros in the following way (see $SRCDIR/include/includes.h):

1. If an AIX system, it sets printing style to AIX.

2. If an HPUX system, it sets printing style to HPUX.

3. If a QNX system, it sets printing style to QNX.

4. If a System V system, it sets printing style to SYSV.

5. Otherwise, it sets the printing style to BSD.

This works for the majority of systems but needs to be changed if your system is not one of AIX, HPUX, QNX, or System V, but uses System V printing. It also must be changed if you are using PLP, LPRNG, or SOFTQ.

If you do need to change the default printing style, simply add the following parameter to the global section:

printing = <your printing selection>

If your system is truly bizarre and does not conform to one of the printing styles, you might need to set individual print commands to get printing to work correctly.

Sams Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours		ContentsIndex
Hour 8: Printers		Previous HourNext Hour
Sections in this Chapter: Samba and Printing Automatic Printer Driver Installation Supported Printing Styles Printing from UNIX to Windows The [printers] Share Summary Printer-Related Parameters Q&A		Previous SectionNext Section

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