Enabling CUPS

  For Developers

Peter Krenesky, from the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University, has verified that CUPS is installable and works on the XO over a traditional wireless network with the following steps from the Terminal activity:

Install CUPS:

su -
yum install cups.i386

Yum currently fails in 8.2 builds. This is covered in | Trac ticket 8125. There is a workaround there too. Sometimes repeating the command a second time will work.

Configure your printer (in terminal)

Configure your printer by editing:

/etc/cups/printers.conf

Example entry in printers.conf

<Printer fooprinter>
DeviceURI ipp://19.86.47.16
</Printer>

Restart CUPS

/etc/init.d/cups restart

or

/sbin/service cups start

Configure CUPS using CUPS' html interface

Rather than editing printer.conf, a full featured visual admin tool is available. In Browse open 'http://localhost:631/admin/ You will be prompted for a username and password when you try to save. I enabled root by typing the following at the command prompt (terminal): sudo passwd root and then typed the password twice, as prompted. This allowed me to use the username root and the password I choose at the prompt in the CUPS interface.

Print using the lpr command

lpr -P fooprinter foodoc.ps

(In the above example, the printer name is "fooprinter" and the document being printed is "foodoc.ps".)

The long-term plan is a Sugar integration, but in a pinch this should get you started. Of course, the option remains to copy your files to a USB stick and print from another machines.

Print from Firefox

One Sugar activity with printer support is Firefox. This has a traditional menu system. This will give you an example of printing integrated with an activity. File/Print/ brings up a traditional print dialog.

See also

• Printing Design
• Printer Support
• Tony Pearson's Printing on XO laptop with CUPS and LPR