5 Configuring CUPS Clients

5.1 UNIX® Clients

CUPS will also need to be installed on your UNIX® clients. Once CUPS is installed on the clients, then CUPS printers that are shared across the network are often automatically discovered by the printer managers for various desktop environments such as GNOME or KDE. Alternatively, one can access the local CUPS interface on the client machine at http://localhost:631 and click on “Add Printer” in the Administration section. When presented with the “Device” drop-down box, simply select the networked CUPS printer, if it was automatically discovered, or select ipp or http and enter the IPP or HTTP URI of the networked CUPS printer, usually in one of the two following syntaxes:

ipp://server-name-or-ip/printers/printername

http://server-name-or-ip:631/printers/printername

If the CUPS clients have difficulty finding other CUPS printers shared across the network, sometimes it is helpful to add or create a file /usr/local/etc/cups/client.conf with a single entry as follows:

ServerName server-ip

In this case, server-ip would be replaced by the local IP address of the CUPS server on the network.

5.2 Windows® Clients

Versions of Windows® prior to XP did not have the capability to natively network with IPP-based printers. However, Windows XP and later versions do have this capability. Therefore, to add a CUPS printer in these versions of Windows is quite easy. Generally, the Windows administrator will run the Windows Add Printer wizard, select Network Printer and then enter the URI in the following syntax:

http://server-name-or-ip:631/printers/printername

If one has an older version of Windows without native IPP printing support, then the general means of connecting to a CUPS printer is to use net/samba3 and CUPS together, which is a topic outside the scope of this chapter.