Tarantella Administration Guide > Before you begin > Introducing Tarantella printing

Introducing Tarantella printing

How Tarantella printing works

Tarantella lets users print from Windows, X and character applications to a printer attached to their client device. Tarantella does this by co-operating with the lp or lpr UNIX printing system on the Tarantella server and the native printing system on the application server.

When a user prints, the print job is sent from the application server to the Tarantella server. The Tarantella server then sends the print job to the client device, which sends it to the user's printer. Tarantella printing uses distributed printing which means that print jobs are sent to the Tarantella server which is hosting the application's emulator session.

If the format of the print job used by the application server is different to the format needed by the client device, the Tarantella server converts the print job before sending it.

How users control Tarantella print jobs

Users control their own print jobs from their Tarantella webtop. They can:

• See when documents are printing.
• Pause and cancel the current print job.
• See printing status information, for example, whether the Tarantella printing system is paused.

If a user logs in to Tarantella and they have print jobs paused in the queue, they see a warning message. The message reminds users about the print jobs and allows them to start printing them.

When printing from a Windows 2000/2003 or UNIX application server, users can choose which printer they print to. If the user does not select a printer, the output will go to their default printer. For all other application servers, the output always goes to the client device's default printer.

If a user wants to change their default printer, they must log out of Tarantella, change the default printer and then log in to Tarantella again.

How Tarantella Administrators control Tarantella print services

Tarantella Administrators control printing services with the tarantella print command. This command lets you:

• List spooled print jobs and identify the Tarantella users they belong to. You can use this to check that print jobs from the application server printing system have reached the Tarantella print queue.
• Remove print jobs from the Tarantella print queue.
• Pause and restart Tarantella printing services.
• Move print jobs from one Tarantella server to another.

How do I set up Tarantella printing?

To set up Tarantella printing you need to:

1. Configure your application servers:
   • UNIX application server
   • Windows 2000/2003 application server
   • Windows NT 4 application server
   • Windows NT 3.51 application server
   • Windows application server using SCO Merge protocol
2. Configure the Tarantella server to accept remote print requests.
3. Configure printing if you use the Common UNIX Printing System™ (CUPS).
4. Configure printing for UNIX clients.
5. Configure Tarantella print job conversion.
6. Test that printing works. If you have trouble printing, follow the steps in the printing troubleshooter.

Depending on your printing requirements, you may not need to carry out all of these steps.