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.
