How to set up dummy printer on UNIX

UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users
1

Hi,

I work at IT department of a home furnishing company in Canada. Presently we are working on printer issue on UNIX system and we like to set up a dummy printer on the system. We are not much sure about the procedure to try it and it woul dbe great if we get some advice to go ahead.

Thanks a lot.
Srabanti

2

I have something like that at office, using APSFILTER (on FreeBSD) we share a line printer using samba for our Windows workstations and lpd for some unix like hosts. The problem I found was not sharing the printer... the real problem was finding the correct driver for the printer, it depends on your printer model. Take a look at the printcap manual page printcap(5) on your UNIX system.

3

You might want to post your OS and version and exactly what you are looking for as far as a dummy printer - do you want it to 'print' to a file, not to print at all (but go through the steps)...

See the man page for lp, lpstat, enable, lpq, lprm, printers.conf as a start.

4

Hi
Thank you for the tips and I have been busy a while to check it out. Anyway, the OS we are using is AIX 4.3 and I don't need to print at all. So I am only looking for a printer to go through the print steps without printing anything and that way optimize the print copies.

Thanks a lot.
Srabanti