When you send a print job to the printer daemon, such as
printing a text file from Emacs or
printing an image from The GIMP, the
print job is added to the print spool queue. The print spool queue
is a list of print jobs that have been sent to the printer and
information about each print request, such as the status of the
request, the username of the person who sent the request, the
hostname of the system that sent the request, the job number, and
more.
If you are running a graphical desktop environment, click the
Printer Manager icon on the panel to start
the GNOME Print Manager as shown in
Figure
34-13.
To change the printer settings, right-click on the icon for the
printer and select Properties. The
Printer Configuration Tool is then
started.
Double-click on a configured printer to view the print spool
queue as shown in Figure
34-14.
To cancel a specific print job listed in the GNOME Print Manager, select it from the list and
select => from the pulldown menu.
If there are active print jobs in the print spool, a printer
notification icon may appear in the Panel
Notification Area of the desktop panel as shown in Figure
34-15. Because it probes for active print jobs every five
seconds, the icon may not be displayed for short print jobs.
Clicking on the printer notification icon starts the GNOME Print Manager and displays a list of
current print jobs.
Also located on the Panel is a Print
Manager icon. To print a file from Nautilus, browse to the location of the file and
drag and drop it on to the Print Manager
icon on the Panel. The window shown in Figure 34-16 is
displayed. Click OK to start printing the
file.
To view the list of print jobs in the print spool from a shell
prompt, type the command lpq. The last few
lines look similar to the following:
Rank Owner/ID Class Job Files Size Time
active user@localhost+902 A 902 sample.txt 2050 01:20:46
|
Example 34-1. Example of lpq
output
If you want to cancel a print job, find the job number of the
request with the command lpq and then use
the command lprm job
number. For example, lprm 902
would cancel the print job in Example 34-1. You must
have proper permissions to cancel a print job. You can not cancel
print jobs that were started by other users unless you are logged
in as root on the machine to which the printer is attached.
You can also print a file directly from a shell prompt. For
example, the command lpr sample.txt prints
the text file sample.txt. The print
filter determines what type of file it is and converts it into a
format the printer can understand.
