Department of Mathematics

Linux - How to change your printer

There are two other printers to which grad students are able to print. These are mch406 and mch219 in the Carothers mini labs.

Permanently Change your Default Printer

To change your default printer for all print jobs, you can edit your .login file in your home directory. You need to change the following two lines:

setenv PRINTER lw
setenv LPDEST lw

Change the "lw" to whatever you want your new printer to be. You must log out and then back in for the change to take effect.

Choose a Different Printer per Job

If you do not want to permanently change your default printer, you can override it on the command line or in individual applications with the following information.

Command Line

To override the printer on the command line, you can use the "-P" switch. For example, to print the file "filename.ps" on the printer in the Carothers building Math graduate computer lab in 406 MCH, you can type:

lpr -Pmch406 filename.ps

Within Applications

Most applications, such as Firefox, Open Office and the Adobe PDF Viewer (acroread), will have a list of printers from which you can pick. However, in most of these applications, you have to pick Print from the File menu in order to be able to select the printer. If you print from a printer icon, it will immediately print to the printer you have set as default.

To change the default printer in applications that do not have the printer list showing by default, you can put the appropriate lpr command into the print command line, as illustrated with the following example for XPDF.

XPDF Viewer (xpdf)