Department of Computing Imperial College London
Lab Printers

This page describes the printers in the Department of Computing Labs on level 2. They are only for use by Department of Computing staff and students. They are all capable of duplex printing (on both sides of a sheet of paper) and should do so by default.

As of 1 October 2008 the Lab printers to use ICT's print system. To print you need to print to the ICTMono print queue (\\winprint2\ICTMono on Windows). Once you've done this you need to release the job Each student will be allocated a fixed amount of quota. Printing is charged at 2p per side for A4 paper and 4p per side for A3.

We also have a colour printer Hue. It is expensive to run and there will usually be a charge for using it (expect at least 30p per page). This may be waived for students printing final year project reports. Come to discuss your colour printing needs at the CSG helpdesk in room 220. All jobs printed to Hue are held on the queue until a member of CSG releases them for printing.

Printing from Linux

We now drive these printers via the CUPS framework, so most applications should just do the right thing by magic. However, you may still print postscript (and perhaps some other forms) to a printer via:

lpr -Pprintername filename

Similarly, to check the printer queue either go to the CUPS printer status page (the links in the above table) or:

lpq -Pprintername

To cancel a printjob (get the jobnumber from running the above command, or enter your user name instead to remove all your print jobs):

lprm -Pprintername jobnumber

If you always use the same printer you can set that as your default thus enabling you to use the lpr command without adding the printer name.

To find out your current default printer run the command:

echo $PRINTER

This setting will usually be in your .cshrc file. Look for a line similar to the following, or add it otherwise:

setenv PRINTER ICTMono

Printing from Windows laptops

If you are using a PC/laptop which is not running a CSG Windows setup you can access most printers on the list above by entering the following in the Run box under the Start menu:

\\winprint2.doc.ic.ac.uk\printername and authenticating as WIN\username

Our print server currently doesn't have the correct print drivers for 64 bit windows machines. We suggest looking at the ICT printing instructions
here

Mac Laptops

For a Mac laptop add a printer using the settings in the image below replacing "username" with your DoC username:

Image of mac_printer_config

Linux Laptops

For a Linux laptop we suggest copying this example printers.conf to /etc/cups/printers.conf on your laptop. You'll need to replace "username" with your DoC username.

You may also wish to copy this ppd file to /etc/cups/ppd/ICTMono.ppd in order to use the full functionality of the printer.

Questions and Answers on printing

© CSG / Sept 2007