printing

No, I don't mean having your program print something to the screen:

printf("Hello, world...\n");

I mean sending a PS file (if you're lucky) to a mechanical device which puts its content on paper. What good is that? You can't grep paper. You can't pipe programs to or from it or even copy and paste with it. I guess it works when the power is out, but you can't read it in the dark. A wise man once told me "the only time I've had to print something is when I had to hand it to an idiot". Since this post is about doing something that's not cool I'll describe a non-cool way to approach the issue since it relates to a non-cool part of my job and I'm just going to log it here. Sorry it's lame. I hope the anecdote made this post worth reading on some level.

Anyway, If you're configuring a RedHat box that wasn't minimally installed you can add printers remotely by doing:

ssh -X server

Once you're in you can do:

sudo /usr/sbin/system-config-printer-gui

<sarcasm>love it!</sarcasm> Note that the GUI requires you to have something present for the printer path. This seems like a bug since there are times when I want to print to a network printer like an LaserJet 4000 and this field simply doesn't apply. If this happens you can create the printer with the GUI and then you need to go in and edit the file that it generates (which is /etc/cups/printers.conf) and delete that path.