Ricoh Printer Configuration on CUPS
1. Introduction
Although UNIX has been around for many years its printing system has not changed very
much. Most UNIX printing systems are still based on the Line Print Daemon Protocol
(LPD) for remote printing. This protocol is widely accepted due to its simplicity and ease
of implementation, but with the advancement in printing technology it has reached its
limits and cannot support more sophisticated requirements such as security and access
control.
The Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS) was developed to answer this limitation
and to provide a common platform for printing. The Internet Printing Protocol (IPP), the
protocol on which CUPS is based, allows for more interaction between hosts, print
servers and print devices by utilizing the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) as a means
of communication. With this setup, a growing number of features can be easily
implemented by defining new sets of operations. With the IPP protocol, jobs can be sent
locally or remotely over the Internet regardless of the location so long as it is accessible
through HTTP.
CUPS is a robust in printing system loaded with great features. These include printer
classes, access control, built-in backend modules, web-based configuration and
Application Programming Interface (API).
Printer classes provide the ability to group printers such that jobs sent to a class are
forwarded to the first available member of that class. This improves the availability of
printer resources and avoids downtime if one of the printers is unavailable or goes
offline.
To maintain compatibility with both System V and Berkeley style of printing, CUPS
provides support for both
lp
and
lpr
print commands in addition to the other utilities. It
also includes limited support for LPD client by providing its own LPD daemon.
This paper illustrates how to configure a Ricoh printer or multifunction device (MFD) on
CUPS. The installation process only covers driver setup on devices with the Postscript
option enabled. To learn more on how to setup non-Postscript devices, refer to the CUPS
documentations listed in the
References
section.
Several installation procedures using different tools are covered in this paper using both
screenshots and command line interface to describe the process. Linux is used as the
operating system in this paper. If another UNIX-flavored platform is used, the same
procedures should apply so long as the same tool exists on that platform.
This paper does not cover the implementation of CUPS and its Application Programming
Interface (API). The CUPS book by Michael Sweet, listed in the
References
section, is
recommended to readers interested in this area.
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