22.6. Configuring the Printer Administration Module
Like many Webmin modules, Printer Administration has several options that can be configured by clicking on the Module Config link on the main page. The options that you can safely change are listed under Configurable options on the configuration page, as shown in Table 22.1:
| Show enabled and accepting status instead of driver? | If this option is set to Yes, the module's main page will display for each printer whether it is currently printing and if it is accepting new jobs. If set to No (the default), each printer's driver will be shown instead. |
| Seconds to wait before refreshing print queue | If Don't refresh is not chosen, then the print jobs page will be periodically refreshed automatically if it is displayed in your browser. The number entered for this option is the number of seconds between each refresh. |
| Sort printers by | If Name is selected, the list of printers on the module's main page will be ordered by name. Otherwise if Order in system is selected (which is default), they will most likely be displayed in the order that they were created. |
| On main page show | Normally the module's main page contains a lot of information about each printer, such as its destination, driver, and description. On some systems that have a large number of printers, this can be very slow—particularly on Solaris. If Just printer names is chosen for this option, only each printer's name will be shown on the main page, speeding up the display and reducing the page size. |
| Show number of jobs in queues on main page? | This field can be used to have the size of each printer's queue shown on the module's main page. However, it can make the page much slower to display if you have a large number of printers. |
If you upgrade the print server daemon on your system, you will need to change some of the other module configuration options under System configuration so that it can be managed by Webmin. The most common upgrade is to CUPS, which can be installed on almost any Linux or UNIX system and is available as an optional package for many distributions. If you upgrade to CUPS, follow these steps to change the module configuration:
1. | Click on the Module Config link on the module's main page to get to the configuration form. |
2. | Select CUPS from both the Printer configuration style and Printer driver style menus. |
3. | Change the Printers file field to None, as it is not needed by Webmin when using CUPS. |
4. | Set the Directory containing interface programs to the base directory under which all of CUPS's .ppd driver files can be found. This is usually /usr/share/cups/model, but may be different depending on how it was installed. |
5. | Set the Command to start scheduler to the init script command needed to start cupsd, such as /etc/init.d/cups start. If there is no such init script, just leave it set to Determined by printer style. |
6. | Similarly, set the Command to stop scheduler to the init script command that stops cupsd, such as /etc/init.d/cups stop. |
7. | Make sure the Command to run after making changes should be set to None. |
8. |
Another popular print system that you may want to upgrade to is LPRng, particularly if you are running a UNIX variant with a poor print server daemon. If you do, the module must be reconfigured using the following steps:
1. | Click on the Module Config link on the module's main page to get to the configuration form. |
2. | Set the Printer configuration style to LPRng. |
3. | Set the Printer driver style to Webmin. Make sure that ghostscript is installed on your system, as Webmin uses it to create drivers for non-PostScript printers. |
4. | Set the Printers file to /etc/printcap. |
5. | Change the Directory containing interface programs to None. |
6. | Enter the full paths to the smbclient and gs commands into the Path to smbclient and Path to ghostscript fields, respectively. |
7. | If ghostscript was compiled and installed manually, you may need to set the Ghostscript font directories and Ghostscript library directories options to colon-separated lists of directories that contain PostScript font files. These options are used to set the GS_FONTPATH and GS_LIB environment variables, respectively. |
8. | Set all the remaining options to their default values. |
9. |