Red Hat® Linux® 7 Unleashed

Printer Devices

Under Linux, each piece of your computer's hardware is abstracted to a device file (hopefully with an accompanying device driver in the kernel; see Chapter 18, "Linux Filesystems, Disks, and Other Devices," for more details). Printer devices, traditionally named after line printers, are character mode devices and will be found in the /dev directory. Some of these devices, along with the traditional hardware port assignments, are shown in Table 19.1.

Table 19.1. Parallel Printer Devices

Device Name	Printer	Address
/dev/lp0	First parallel printer	0x3bc
/dev/lp1	Second parallel printer	0x378
/dev/lp2	Third parallel printer	0x278

Serial printers are assigned to serial devices, such as /dev/ttySX, where X is a number from 0 to 3. Quite ...