Dell 8000 manual Using the Cups browser interface, Getting OpenOffice to print

2.4.1Using the CUPS browser interface

CUPS’ printer controls are located, conveniently, here:

http://localhost:631/

There’s a menu of tasks to choose from, from which you can configure new printers and manage the jobs of already-configured ones. You’ll have to be root for this, but working through a browser that a user owns. (So, just open up your favorite browser in an X-session as you, and then enter root’s name and password at the prompt.)

From here, it’s easy. Go to “Manage Printers,” then “add printer.” You’ll be prompted for a “device URI,” which apparently stands for Universal Resource Identifier. Since you’re printing to a Windoze printer over samba (you choose this somewhere), it’ll start you off with smb://. Just fill in the path of your remote printer from there. My printer was on

BRN 31D11E (trust that Windoze to come up with some weird, arbitrary printer domain name!), and the printer name was BINARY P1, so my device URI looked like this:

smb://BRN 31D11E/BINARY P1

Pretty straightforward.

My printer model (Brother HL-1270N) didn’t show up in the list, so I just clicked “generic printer” (or whatever it was).

And, presto! The thing’s configured! Try printing a test page — mine worked perfectly.

Now, you can use the BSD-style lpr commands to queue things up. Either remember to specify the printer each time (with the -P switch, so: lpr -P printername foo), or set your $PRINTER environment variable to the name of your printer (which, in my case, was BINARY P1).

2.4.2Getting OpenOffice to print

Getting the newly-configured printer to work with OpenOffice was a little bit trickier, but still easy. Definitely non-intuitive.

After a bit of googling, I found that you have to run the spadmin script that pops up in the OpenOffice install in order to get it to talk to you printer.

As you (not root), do the following in X:

/usr/lib/openoffice/program/spadmin

A little win-like interface pops up, and it’s easy to click through it to add your new printer, which should show up. It did for me, at least :-).

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