The primary mechanism for Ubuntu printing and print services is the Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS). This printing system is a freely available, portable printing layer which has become the new standard for printing in most Linux distributions.
CUPS manages print jobs and queues and provides network printing using the standard Internet Printing Protocol (IPP), while offering support for a very large range of printers, from dot-matrix to laser and many in between. CUPS also supports PostScript Printer Description (PPD) and auto-detection of network printers, and features a simple web-based configuration and administration tool.
To install CUPS on your Ubuntu computer, simply use sudo with the apt-get command and give the packages to install as the first parameter. A complete CUPS install has many package dependencies, but they may all be specified on the same command line. Enter the following at a terminal prompt to install CUPS:
Upon authenticating with your user password, the packages should be downloaded and installed without error. Upon the conclusion of installation, the CUPS server will be started automatically.
For troubleshooting purposes, you can access CUPS server errors via the error log file at:
sudo apt-get install cups
Upon authenticating with your user password, the packages should be downloaded and installed without error. Upon the conclusion of installation, the CUPS server will be started automatically.
For troubleshooting purposes, you can access CUPS server errors via the error log file at:
/var/log/cups/error_log. If the error log does not show enough information to troubleshoot any problems you encounter, the verbosity of the CUPS log can be increased by changing the LogLevel directive in the configuration file (discussed below) to "debug" or even "debug2", which logs everything, from the default of "info". If you make this change, remember to change it back once you've solved your problem, to prevent the log file from becoming overly large.
The Common UNIX Printing System server's behavior is configured through the directives contained in the file
/etc/cups/cupsd.conf. The CUPS configuration file follows the same syntax as the primary configuration file for the Apache HTTP server, so users familiar with editing Apache's configuration file should feel at ease when editing the CUPS configuration file. Some examples of settings you may wish to change initially will be presented here.![[Tip]](https://help.ubuntu.com/11.10/libs/admon/tip.png) | |
| Prior to editing the configuration file, you should make a copy of the original file and protect it from writing, so you will have the original settings as a reference, and to reuse as necessary. Copy the /etc/cups/cupsd.conf file and protect it from writing with the following commands, issued at a terminal prompt: |
