CUPS is a set of drivers and utilities that provide full printer support, management and usage tools for Linux and other Unix-based OS.
CUPS provides it’s own graphical configuration tools that work through the web. Pont your browser to http://localhost:631
you may need to give your user or root password, and you’ll see the CUPS homepage. From here you can add and remove printers as well as manage print jobs and read the docs.
The web interface means you don’t need any graphicall toolkits installed, you don’t even need X running on the computer. You could access the interface through a text browser or from a browser on another computer.
**Isn’t that a bit insecure?
**It could be, but the default CUPS settings only allow connections from localhost. You can alter this to allow connections for your LAN (allowing internet access is generally not rocommended) and also control which users access which parts of the coniguration.
**Is MY Printer supported?
**First stop should be OpenPrinting - The Linux Foundation which maintains a list of how well or not each printer is supported and advice on which driver to use. Ideally, you should check here before buying a printer.