This chapter provides information for the person who is the Administrator of the system, or who sets up printers and scanners and troubleshoots problems.
The Administrator of the system can set default printer-specific options using the Printer Manager. Once these options are set, they automatically apply to all print jobs submitted by all users. Any User can override the default options using either the Printer Manager (as described below) or PrintPanel (see “Setting Printer-Specific Options”); the new options will apply only to print jobs submitted by that user.
The Administrator can set default printer-specific options by following these steps:
Log in to the system as root.
Start the Printer Manager by clicking the launch icon, or by choosing “Printer Manager” from the System toolchest.
Choose “Set Options” from the Printer menu.
Set the printer-specific options (see “Setting Printer-Specific Options” for information), then click the OK button.
In the dialog box that appears, click the All Users button.
Impressario has a client/server network printing architecture. Impressario servers are workstations that have at least one printer or scanner directly connected to them. Impressario clients are workstations that use the printers or scanners connected to Impressario servers.
All Impressario client machines may submit print jobs and monitor the status of the printer and print queue just as if the printer were connected directly to the client. This network transparency makes it possible to connect a printer to any system in your network and have full access to the printer from any workstation, without the need for additional network hardware in the printer.
When you submit a print job from an Impressario client, your file, along with any print options, is transmitted to the server. The server queues up your print job upon receipt of a print request. Once the printer you specified is available, the server processes the options sent with the print job, converts the file to a printable format (if necessary), and then prints the file. The client polls the server occasionally to retrieve information on the status of the printer and the print queue. The server processes these requests and sends back the information to the client.
The server consists of drivers that communicate with the printer, filters that convert data from one format to another, and fonts that may be used in formatting the data.
The client consists of graphical tools for submitting and monitoring the status of a print job, and a network interface for sending print requests to the server.
Impressario uses the SVR3 spooling system to queue print jobs. Impressario supplements the spooling system with graphical printing tools, filters, and a network status daemon called podd. The configuration files for the spooling system are located in the directory /var/spool/lp. The following additional directories are created when Impressario is installed:
| /var/spool/lp/pod |
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| /var/spool/lp/gui_model |
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| /var/spool/lp/gui_interface |
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| /var/spool/lp/settings |
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| /var/spool/lp/activeicons |
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| /var/spool/lp/app-defaults |
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| /var/spool/lp/devices |
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This section identifies the location of the settings files and describes ways to save multiple settings for a single printer.
 | Note: See Chapter 2, “Printing with Impressario,” for information on saving the settings for a particular printer. |
When you save printer settings, the configuration information is saved in the directory /var/spool/lp/settings. Within this directory are directories named after each printer on your system. For example, the settings files for the printer named “speedy” are located in the directory /var/spool/lp/settings/speedy. The settings files are named after the user who saved printer configuration information from the PrintPanel. Thus, if the users named “joe” and “peg” saved settings for the printer “speedy,” there will be settings files named /var/spool/settings/speedy/joe and /var/spool/settings/speedy/peg.
You may find it convenient to save useful groups of settings for a single printer. For example, say you have a printer named speedy that can print single-sided or double-sided pages. Whenever you print presentations, you want them single-sided; when you print long documents, you want them double-sided.
Rather than change speedy's settings when you change the type of document you're printing, you can create two instances of speedy, say speedysingle and speedydouble. Set one to print single-sided and the other to print double-sided, and drag both icons onto your desktop. Now you can easily print single- or double-sided files by just dropping them on the appropriate instance of speedy.
To create the two instances of speedy, use the Printer Manager and create them as two network printers (this works even if speedy is physically connected to your system).
You can use the Scanner Manager to access a scanner that is connected to another system on the network (see “Setting Up Scanner Software”) and use gscan to scan from the scanner (see “Choosing to Scan from a Scanner”) as long as both systems have Impressario installed.
When you set up a new scanner or access it for scanning, the client system contacts the server system and requests that it start the scannerd daemon. Since scanners cannot queue scan jobs, only one user can use the scanner at a time.
The Impressario Server printing software can recognize many different types of files. Once a file type is identified, the printing software uses a set of rules to convert the file from its original type into a printable format.
Included with Impressario is the file viewing program vstiff. vstiff uses the same set of rules as the printing software and is able to convert virtually any type of file into a format that can be viewed on your display. You can use vstiff as a debugging tool; if a print job does not print or prints incorrectly, run vstiff on the file you want to print and note any error messages it displays.
See Chapter 4, “Viewing Files with vstiff” and the vstiff(1) man page for information on using vstiff.
| Note: The rule set and filters exist only on an Impressario server. vstiff cannot convert all printable files into a viewable format on systems that do not have Impressario installed. |
When Impressario is installed on your system, a set of support files is copied to your disk. These support files replace existing IRIX files. The chksupport program checks to ensure that the support files have been properly installed on your system and that the original IRIX files have been saved. To run chksupport type:
/usr/etc/chksupport verify “impr*” impressario
If the command reports that no files match the query, Impressario is properly installed. For more information, see the Impressario Release Notes and the chksupport program itself.