Quick Start Guide
14 Printer Operation
openSUSE® supports printing with many types of printers, including remote network
printers. Printers can be congured manually or with YaST. For conguration instruc-
tions, refer to Section 14.4, “Setting Up a Printer” (page 165). Both graphical and
command line utilities are available for starting and managing print jobs. If your
printer does not work as expected, refer to Section 14.8, “Troubleshooting” (page 174).
CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) is the standard print system in openSUSE.
Printers can be distinguished by interface, such as USB or network, and printer lan-
guage. When buying a printer, make sure that the printer has an interface (like USB
or parallel port) that is available on your hardware and a suitable printer language.
Printers can be categorized on the basis of the following three classes of printer
languages:
PostScript Printers
PostScript is the printer language in which most print jobs in Linux and Unix are
generated and processed by the internal print system. If PostScript documents
can be processed directly by the printer and do not need to be converted in addi-
tional stages in the print system, the number of potential error sources is reduced.
Standard Printers (Languages Like PCL and ESC/P)
Although these printer languages are quite old, they are still undergoing expansion
to address new features in printers. In the case of known printer languages, the
print system can convert PostScript jobs to the respective printer language with
the help of Ghostscript. This processing stage is referred to as interpreting. The
best-known languages are PCL (which is mostly used by HP printers and their
clones) and ESC/P (which is used by Epson printers). These printer languages are
usually supported by Linux and produce an adequate print result. Linux may not
be able to address some special printer functions. Except for HP developing HPLIP
(HP Linux Imaging and Printing), there are currently no printer manufacturers
who develop Linux drivers and make them available to Linux distributors under
an open source license.
Proprietary Printers (Also Called GDI Printers)
These printers do not support any of the common printer languages. They use
their own undocumented printer languages, which are subject to change when
a new edition of a model is released. Usually only Windows drivers are available
for these printers. See Section 14.8.1, “Printers without Standard Printer Language
Support” (page 174) for more information.
Before you buy a new printer, refer to the following sources to check how well the
printer you intend to buy is supported:
Printer Operation 163