Generally accessible in the ARBI are one laser printer in each of the rooms A4 2-205 (BSD room 1, BLUE), A4 2-215 (SUN room, VIOLET), A4 2-220 (BSD room 2, RED), A4 2-208 (disposal room, ORANGE) and A4 2-202 (BSD room 3, GREEN).
Other printers that are specially equipped (duplex unit, fine print, etc.) and have a better output quality can also be accessed after registration. If necessary, please ask the ARBI staff. All printers are controlled via a so-called printer spooler. The printer spooler receives print jobs and coordinates the output to the respective printer.
The printers have the following names within the spooler system:
lwbsd, lwblau Laser printer in room A4 2-205
lwsun, lwviolett Laser printer in room A4 2-215
lwbsd2, lwred Laser printer in room A4 2-220
lwvfg, lworange Laser printer in room A4 2-208
lwbsd3, lwgruen Laser printer in room A4 2-202
These names must be entered in the commands for controlling the printer spooler. If you want to commit to a specific printer for a longer period of time, it may be useful to set the environment variable PRINTER:
export PRINTER=lwbsd (in ksh and bash notation)
All commands for controlling the printer spooler now control the printer 'lwbsd'. By explicitly specifying the printer name, a different printer can also be used temporarily.
The following commands exist to control a print of the printer spooler:
lpr lpr is used to send a print job to a printer.
lpq lpq can be used to output the queue and, if applicable, the print job being processed to a printer.
lprm with lprm a print job can be removed from the queue or the active print job can be cancelled. lprm expects the spool ID (job number) of the print job to be removed or cancelled. This can be determined using the lpq command.
All three commands have the option
-printer name
option, which can be used to specify the printer to be controlled.
The printing system has an integrated print page limit: each login account is allocated a print page account that starts with 50 pages of 'credit'. The maximum number of pages per print job is 100 pages. If the print page account is 'in the red', printing is no longer possible. If the account balance is below 50 pages credit, 5 pages will be added to the credit every day until a maximum of 50 pages credit is reached again. If there is a justified need, printing can be carried out on request regardless of the print page limit or a larger credit balance can be set. The status of the print page account can be queried at any time using the command sequence "echo query | lpr -printer name -quota" without inverted commas. The message is sent by email to
Print jobs that have an excessive dwell time in the printer spooler are automatically deleted by the system. This measure is necessary because print jobs have been started too often without first checking the operating status of the respective printer (paper jam, paper supply, etc.). If this maximum dwell time (currently 15 minutes) causes problems with large print jobs, ARBI staff must be contacted for assistance.
The laser printers only process PostScript data. PostScript is a page description language which, as a kind of programming language, describes which things (letters, lines, curves, images) are to be printed where on the paper. Many programme systems already generate the print output as PostScript, so that it can be transferred directly to the printer spooler using lpr.
Text files can be converted with the a2ps programme so that a PostScript printer prints the text to be output. a2ps has a wide range of options for controlling the output format. This includes setting the font size, the number of text pages per output page (paper-saving!) and much more. Attention: a2ps controls a printer by itself using lpr, so that the specification of the -printer name options or the setting of the environment variable PRINTER is necessary.
Please check that the printer is ready to print before printing. Never send print jobs unnecessarily and do not repeat the print job unnecessarily in the event of a problem. Never clear a paper jam yourself. Ask an ARBI employee for help in the event of a fault.
When processing PostScript data with a laser printer, messages or error messages may have been generated by the printer. These messages are sent by email after the printing process has been completed (possibly without a page having been printed!). The email should therefore also be heeded in the event of printing problems.