Chapter 8: Peripherals and Printing - 3 Questions

Question 1

Which peripheral, expansion, and storage buses does Lion support?

Answer 1

Lion supports Universal Serial Bus (USB), FireWire, Thunderbolt, and Bluetooth peripheral buses; PCI Express (PCIe), PC Card, and ExpressCard 34 expansion buses; and Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA), Serial ATA (SATA), Small Computer System Interface (SCSI), Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), and Fibre Channel storage buses.

Question 2

What is a device driver? What are three primary types of device drivers?

Answer 2

A device driver is software specially designed to facilitate communication between Lion and a peripheral. Device drivers can be kernel extensions, framework plug-ins, or standalone applications.

Question 3

How does Lion support third-party devices without needing third-party device drivers?

Answer 3

Lion uses built-in generic drivers based on each device class. For example, generic drivers for scanners and printers can be used in lieu of official third-party drivers.

Question 4

What is CUPS?

Answer 4

Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS) manages all printing and faxing for Lion, including both local and shared printing.

Question 5

What are PPD files responsible for?

Answer 5

PostScript Printer Description (PPD) files are printer driver files that tell CUPS how to communicate with specific printer models.

Question 6

How do you share printers with other Mac and Windows
users?

Answer 6

You can enable printer sharing for Mac clients from the Print & Scan or Sharing preferences, but to enable authenticated print sharing to Windows clients, you must also enable users’ passwords in the SMB file sharing settings from the Sharing preferences.