Adding a printer is a lot easier than it used to be.  As such, I'm going to encourage you to use the System Manager utility. The SGI Impressario software does a good job of making printing easier to do.  It comes with the SGI Varsity software, and I will assume you have it installed for this page.   If you don't have a graphical interface, you can still use the scripts mentioned below to remove a lot of the difficulty.  Consult your system's owner's manual for information on how to add a printer.  The printer will usually connected to a parallel port on the back.  Nowadays, it's popular to have ethernet cards with printers.  If this is the case, once you have an IP address for the printer, you should be able to set it up through your SGI.  SGI's use UNIX System V printing which uses the lp-based commands.  This page assumes lp printing, and SGI's can have BSD printing (lpr) also, if desired.

    Printers are hardware devices, but to the OS they are software entities that can be turned on and off, and there can be numerous "printers" for a single physical printer.  This can cause a lot of confusion, so it's important to remember.  This is the definition of the printer I will be using, because the low-level hardware communications to the physical printer are not a big concern for getting a printer available for users.

   The first thing that will happen when you print a job is that the system scheduler will take it and attempt to put it into the appropriate printer queue.   If the scheduler is not running, there's not much you can print, because this is the first step.  To find out if it is, enter "ps -ef | grep lpsched".  If there's no "/usr/lib/lpsched" line, then your printer's scheduler isn't running.  You should enter "chkconfig lp on".  Printers are like fast-food restaurants, they have queues, where jobs wait to be serviced.  A queue could be not accepting jobs, but both the scheduler and printer are ready to print.  Now, let's make a printer.  Decide on a name for the printer, and get ready to answer some simple questions about your printer.  Which script you use depends on what kind of printer:

• Remote printers: mknetpr
• Network printers(printers directly connected to the net): mkjtpr
• Serial printers: mkserialpr
• Parallel printers: mkcentpr
• SCSI printers: mkscsipr

These scripts will make the printer and take care of the underlying OS changes.  You should be able to print right away to your new printer.  Use "lp -d your_printer_name" to submit a job, and "lpstat -o" to check on its progress.  Try a test page now to confirm that it printed.  If it didn't print, try an ASCII file like /etc/cshrc that should print on all printers.  Did it work now? Impressario will recognize whether a file is text or Postscript without any options being passed to it.  This is all there is to it.  Sometimes adminstrating printers is harder than setting one up.
Here are some commands you should know about.  Enter "man command_name" to find out more about each one.

• lp/cancel    (print a file/cancel a print request)
• lpstat    (printer lp status information)
• lpsched/lpshut  (start the print scheduler, stop the print scheduler)
• accept/reject    (accept jobs on printer's queue/reject jobs from printer's queue)
• enable/disable  (enable/disable the queue to actually send jobs to the printer, a printer's queue and the printer's ability to print are independent.)
• lpadmin  (administrate printers, advanced)
• lpmove  (move printer requests from one printer to another.)

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last updated 1/31/00 by Martin McCormick, martinm@sas.upenn.edu
All opinions, errors or omissions are mine alone and do not reflect those of the University of Pennsylvania.