9.2 Introduction

In order to use printers with FreeBSD, you will need to set them up to work with the Berkeley line printer spooling system, also known as the LPD spooling system. It is the standard printer control system in FreeBSD. This chapter introduces the LPD spooling system, often simply called LPD, and will guide you through its configuration.

If you are already familiar with LPD or another printer spooling system, you may wish to skip to section Setting up the spooling system.

LPD controls everything about a host's printers. It is responsible for a number of things:

Through a configuration file (/etc/printcap), and by providing the special filter programs, you can enable the LPD system to do all or some subset of the above for a great variety of printer hardware.

9.2.1 Why You Should Use the Spooler

If you are the sole user of your system, you may be wondering why you should bother with the spooler when you do not need access control, header pages, or printer accounting. While it is possible to enable direct access to a printer, you should use the spooler anyway since:

This, and other documents, can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/.

For questions about FreeBSD, read the documentation before contacting <questions@FreeBSD.org>.
For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.

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