10.2 Introduction

In order to use printers with FreeBSD you may set them up to work with the Berkeley line printer spooling system, also known as the LPD spooling system, or just LPD. It is the standard printer control system in FreeBSD. This chapter introduces LPD and will guide you through its configuration.

If you are already familiar with LPD or another printer spooling system, you may wish to skip to section Basic Setup.

LPD controls everything about a host's printers. It is responsible for a number of things:

Through a configuration file (/etc/printcap), and by providing the special filter programs, you can enable the LPD system to do all or some subset of the above for a great variety of printer hardware.

10.2.1 Why You Should Use the Spooler

The spooler still provides benefit on a single-user system and should be used because: