11. Printing and Printers

Printing is easy to overlook. Many people dismiss it as a minor subsystem in Linux. I learned that was not the case one Friday. I received an urgent call for assistance from the payroll department. It was payday, and the payroll system was unable to print. Hundreds of people in that company were praying for the printing subsystem to be fixed. In this chapter, we discuss the major types of printer hardware, the major spooler software available, and ways to troubleshoot both.

What Is a Spooler?

Generally speaking, a spooler is a queue for a limited resource. It is a way of throttling and controlling access to these resources. In the long-forgotten dark days of yore, computers were extremely expensive. They were held in ...

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