Configure a cups-pdf printer on Cups and use it on AIX

I will briefly describe how to set a cups-pdf on cups on Linux and configure AIX to use it. It is an easy task.

  1. Install on Linux cups and cups-pdf (for SucksE (Suse) you can find it in openSuse repositories).

The cups-pdf package configures automaticly a printer called "cups-pdf"

  1. You can access the CUPS configuration page via http://localhost:631. If it is in a remote server, you can forward the port via SSH: "ssh -R 6310:localhost:631 host" and access via http://localhost:631.

  2. To use it on AIX, you need to configure the LPD protocol enabling cups-lpd in xinetd: On suse you must enable it in /etc/xinetd.d/cups-lpd.NOTE: You must disable the usage of banners (added by default by cups-lpd when converting from lpd to ipp) or you will get always a file called "Test_Page.pdf" with only the banner. I think that newer versions of cups solve this problem. To do that, you must add to cups-lpd the option -o job-sheets=none

    sed 's/(disable.=)./\1 no/' -i /etc/xinetd.d/cups-lpd
    grep -q job-sheets=none /etc/xinetd.d/cups-lpd || sed 's/(server_args.=.)/\1 -o job-sheets=none/' -i /etc/xinetd.d/cups-lpd /etc/init.d/xinetd reload

Finally on AIX, you can create you new printer as a BSD printer:

/usr/lib/lpd/pio/etc/piomisc_ext mkpq_remote_ext  -q 'cups-pdf' -h 'remoteserver' -r 'cups-pdf' -t 'bsd' -C 'FALSE' -d 'Virtual PDF printer on remoteserver'

That is all. You can use your virtual pdf printer on AIX: ls | lp -d cups-pdf

You may want tune some cups-pdf settings in /etc/cups/cups-pdf.conf, like: