9.1. Red Hat

Red Hat has a GUI printer administration tool called printtool which can add remote printers and printers on local devices. It lets you choose a ghostscript-supported printer type and Unix device file to print to, then installs a print queue in/etc/printcap and uses a filter program from the rhs-printfilters package to support postscript and other common input types. This solution works fairly well, and is trivial to setup for common cases.

Red Hat 6.x shipped a BSD LPD flavor; Red Hat 7.x and 8.0 appear to default to using LPRng.

Where Red Hat 6.x and 7.x fail is when you have a printer which isn't supported by their standard Ghostscript (which is GNU rather than Aladdin Ghostscript, and which supports fewer printers). Check in the printer compatibility list above (or online) if you find that you can't print properly with the stock Red Hat software. If your printer isn't supported by Red Hat's tools, you may need to install a contributed venison of Aladdin Ghostscript, and will probably also be better off if you use the lpdomatic or apsfilter packages, which know all about the printers supported by late-model Ghostscripts, and others besides.

Red Hat 8.0 still installs LPRng by default although you can select CUPS. But even if you explicitly select only CUPS, LPRng is still installed. In Red Hat 8.1 CUPS will finally be the default spooler.

Red Hat 9.0 finally uses CUPS as default spooler.