Table of Contents
This section describes new and changed printing features in this Solaris release. For a complete listing of new Solaris features and a description of Solaris releases, see What’s New in Solaris Express .
For information on new or changed printing features in the Solaris 10 initial release, see the following references:
Expanded Printer Support
IPP Listener Support
Solaris Express 8/06: In this Solaris release, improvements have been made to the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) feature that was introduced in the Solaris 10 OS. In the Solaris 10 OS, the implementation of IPP provided server side listening support for the protocol. In this Solaris release, client side support for IPP has been added to the Solaris Print Service.
IPP client side support was added to enable Solaris client systems to communicate with IPP-based print services, such as those on the Linux and Mac OS X operating systems, as well as other platforms. Small improvements were made to the IPP Listening Service (server side support) to promote better interoperability. Listening service improvements include some relatively minor changes to converge toward more commonality in representation in printer and job attribute data.
The IPP server and client implementation in the Solaris OS is one of several OpenSolaris™ printing projects that are currently under development. Open printing provides a set of specifications and implementations of software that enables you to create standardized, scalable printing components for the Solaris and Linux software, or any operating system that contains a set of POSIX interfaces.
For more information about server side support for IPP, see IPP Listener Support.
More information about OpenSolaris Printing can be found at .
Solaris Express 8/06: The Free Standards Group (FSG) Open Printing Application Programming Interface (PAPI) implementation provides applications with a single interface for interacting with LPD (bsd/lpd protocol) and IPP based servers, as well as name service storage of configuration data. PAPI is protocol-independent, so applications can be written to use the PAPI. Because these applications are not tied to a particular print server, you can replace one print service with another print service without impacting the layers above. PAPI implementation includes support for PAPI, Version 1.0 of the specification.
PAPI implementation in the Solaris OS includes the modification of several commonly-used BSD and SYSV print commands. The modified print commands are layered on top of the PAPI. As a result, you can run the commands on top of multiple protocols or services.
Some advantages of these new command implementations include:
Improved consistency between desktop applications and command-line interfaces (CLI)
Multiple print protocol and service support from the command line
IPP client side support for improved interoperability with other operating systems and platforms, such as Linux, Mac OS X, and other IPP based print services
Enhanced remote capability when using IPP between print client and print server
Ability to disable network services and retain access to local printers
For more information about the BSD and SYSV command changes, see the following man pages:
accept ( 1M )
cancel ( 1 )
disable ( 1 )
enable ( 1 )
lp ( 1 )
lpc ( 1B )
lpmove ( 1M )
lpq ( 1B )
lprm ( 1B )
lpstat ( 1 )
The PAPI implementation in this Solaris release also includes server side support for IPP, which is layered on top of the API. This support includes a set of protocol-specific libraries and an Apache module, Versions 1.0 and 2.0. As with the print command implementation, the IPP Listening Service can be used with any print service that supports the PAPI. For more information, see Internet Printing Protocol Improvements.
The PAPI print command and IPP implementation in the Solaris OS is one of several OpenSolaris printing projects that are currently under development. Open printing provides a set of specifications and implementations of software that enables you to create standardized, scalable printing components for the Solaris and Linux software, or any operating system that contains a set of POSIX interfaces.
Solaris Express 6/05: The Solaris
printer software has been modified to support remote printer access. This
feature is new in the Solaris Express 2/05 release. You can now specify a
Uniform Device Identifer (URI) device when adding a network printer. You can
use the command-line or Solaris Print Manager to specify a device-uri..
To specify a device-uri from the command-line,
use the lpadmin command with the
v and
m options.
# lpadmin -p printer -v device-uri -m uri
Note that the
v option is still a valid option for
specifying devices other than a device-uri..
For example, to add the printer Lucille, specifying
the device-uri smb://server/queue,
and the interface script that is included in the Solaris printing software,
you would type:
# lpadmin -p lucille -v smb://server/queue -m uri -n /usr/lib/lp/model/ppd \
/system/foomatic/Epson/Epson-Stylus_Color_777-Stc777p.upp.ppd.gz
You must use the
m option in the command-line
syntax to specify an interface script, or the back-.end process ignores the
print request. The script can be the interface script that is included in
the Solaris printing software or another device-uri aware
interface script.
The following device-uri formats are currently
supported:
smb://server/printer
smb://workgroup/server/printer
smb://username:password@server/printer
smb://username:password@workgroup/server/printer
More information can be found at .
The types of modifications that were made to the Solaris printing software
can potentially support additional device-uri schemes.
To specify a device-uri when using Solaris
Print Manager to add a new network printer, select the URI option
in the Protocol drop-down menu of the New Network Printer
page. Provide a supported device- uri in the destination
field.
Other modifications include the following:
The Solaris spooler has been modified to enable the passing
of the device-uri information to the back-end interface
script as the environment variable, DEVICE_URI. Since
this information is passed to the printer as an environment variable, the
existing interface scripts are not able to take advantage of this information.
However, these scripts are not adversely impacted.
The /etc/lp/model/uri file communicates
with the printer through the use of helper applications and the device-uri. The interface script also has the ability to process PPD files
and uses Foomatic to convert print data to a printer-ready format.
Solaris Express 3/05: Solaris Print Manager has
been expanded to include an additional Never Print Banner option.
Using this option ensures that banner pages are never printed for the specified
print queue.
Previously, you only had two choices for printing banner pages in Solaris Print Manager:
You could enable the always print banner option
in Solaris Print Manager.
You could select the banner on or off option when you submitted a print job.
By default,
this option was set to on.
Within Solaris Print Manager, a drop-down menu with the following selections is now available:
Always Print Banner
When this option is selected, banner page printing is turned on, regardless of the command options that are typed on the command line.
User Selectable - Default=on
When this option is selected, banner page printing is turned off, if the appropriate lp command-line option is used. If you do not specify an option from the command line when submitting a print job, banner page printing is turned on by default.
Never Print Banner
When this option is selected, banner page printing is turned off, regardless of the command options that are typed on the command line.
These banner page printing options reflect the options that are available when using the lpadmin command for printing to local print queues. For more information, see the lpadmin ( 1M ) man page.
For more information about the available printing options for a given Solaris release when using the Solaris Print Manager, see Table 1–2.