Daniel,
Absolutely. You can do it by user or workstation. I've
done this as follows...
First, you have to consider from which apps you will want
the default printing to work. Most apps acknowledge the
$PRINTER environment variable. Some, like StarOffice, have
their own printer system on top of the OS's printer system.
So, just realize that this might not be your whole
solution.
Now, all you need to do it get the PRINTER variable set
when the user logs in. Many different scripts are run when
a user logs in. Take your pick. I prefer to control
things at the level of the shell, so (assuming you are
using Bash) that would imply using .bashrc, .bash_profile,
or .profile in each user's home directory (man bash if you
don't know the difference between these files). Or, if you
don't want to have to deal with all those files, you could
just do it in /etc/profile or as an added file in
/etc/profile.d/ (if this directory exists in your
distribution). Actually, the file in /etc/profile.d/ is
probably the best bet. It won't get overwritten if you
upgrade your distribution and it's just a single file. You
can call it whatever you want, but I'd probably call it
default_printer.sh.
Now, all you have to do it put a cute little script in
there to do what you want. It might look something like
this (off the top of my head, so please test it out in a
safe place first):
#!/bin/bash
# default_printer.sh
#
# Sets PRINTER to an appropriate value based on the
workstation name.
#
# file containing assignment of workstations to printers
DEFPRNS=/etc/default_printers
# root is exempt from this policy
if [ "$USER" = "root" ]; then
exit 0
fi
if [ ! -r "$DEFPRNS" ]; then
echo "$DEFPRNS is unreadable or does not exist!"
exit 1
fi
echo -n "setting default printer..."
WHERE=`echo $DISPLAY | awk -F: '{print $1}' | awk -F.
'{print $1}'`
PRINTER=`cat $DEFPRNS | grep -v "^#" | grep ${WHERE} | head
-1 | awk -F: '{print $1}'`
echo " $PRINTER"
# end of default_printer.sh
Now you just need to make the file /etc/default_printers.
The script makes use of the following file format:
Each important line looks like this:
printername:<delim>workstation1<delim>workstation2<delim>etc...
Lines that begin with a '#' are ignored, so you can safely
put comments in the file. Blank lines are also ignored.
The call to 'head -1' makes it safe against accidentally
listing a workstation on more than one line. You can make
the delimeter whatever you want. The only weakness here is
if you had a workstation whose name is a subset of another
workstation's name (like ws1 and ws10). You could
institute a more rigorous format on your printer
assignments file and avoid this, however. For instance, if
you choose your delimeter to be a comma and mandate that
the delimeter must appear before and after each entry, then
you can modify the grep command to look like this:
grep ",${WHERE},"
and you would then be safe.
Once these steps are done, you can build on $PRINTER for
special apps like StarOffice... They would require more
scripting to personlize their printer setups, which should
be stored in some sort of text file somewhere. I've done
it for StarOffice, but I don't have the scripts handy right
now.
If you want to do it on username, just replace $WHERE with
$USER and put usernames in the /etc/default_printers file.
Jason
> From: Daniel =?iso-8859-2?Q?=A3a=B6?=
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: 05 Jun 2002 14:51:06 +0200
> Subject: [Ltsp-discuss] Printing
>
> Hi
>
> I would like to setup my printing system with LTSP, but I
want to select
> default printer for workstation, not for user because
many users will
> login to server with the same user account from different
thin clients.
> Is it possible ? Where should I start to search any
HOWTOs and
> documentations?
>
> Daniel Las
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