8.5. Exercises

Configuring and testing printers involves being in the possession of one, and having access to the root account. If so, you may try:

• Installing the printer using the GUI on your system.

• Printing a test page using the GUI.

• Printing a test page using the lp command.

• Print from within an application, for example Mozilla or OpenOffice, by choosing File->Print from the menu.

• Disconnect the printer from the network or the local machine/print-server. What happens when you try to print something?

The following exercises can be done without printer or root access.

• Try to make PostScript files from different source files, (e.g. HTML, PDF, man pages). Test the results with the gv viewer.

• Check that the print daemon is running.

• Print the files anyway. What happens?

• Make a PostScript file using Mozilla. Test it with gv.

• Convert it to PDF format. Test with xpdf.

• How would you go about printing a GIF file from the command line?

• Use a2ps to print the /etc/profile file to an output file. Test again with gv. What happens if you don't specify an output file?