The user who sends output to the printer may wish to know where the physical printer is located in order to retrieve their output. The System Administrator should be able to point you to the physical printer, if that is the problem.
But, how do I actually get my output to the printer? Debian uses lpr to place print jobs in a queue so that the printer daemon lpd can print it when the printer becomes available. The print behavior is defined in /etc/printcap, and Debian installs this file with the default printer configured as a generic dot-matrix printer. This file declares the port the printer is connected to, among other things, and can be used to send plain ASCII text to most printers. If Fred wishes to see a printed listing of the file private.txt he would enter the command:
lpr private.txt
If this is a busy system, Fred will not expect his job to print right away. He can look at the position of his job in the queue using lpq to list the jobs waiting in the print queue. This command lists the jobs in the queue, in the order they will be printed. A job number is associated with each entry in the queue. This number can be passed to lprm if it becomes necessary to remove a print job from the queue. Fred can, of course, only remove his own jobs from the queue, while the root account can remove any job found there.
If the file to be printed is more complex than simple ASCII text, then a filter will need to be applied in the /etc/printcap file. Packages like magicfilter provide a wide range of filters for most printers. These filters will allow you to print PostScript files to a non-PostScript printer. In combination with programs like dvips (which converts a dvi file to PostScript output) the output of almost any Linux file format can be converted and sent to the printer.