On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 3:26 PM, Mark Knecht <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 1:15 PM, Paul Hartman > <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 3:04 PM, Mark Knecht <[email protected]> wrote: >>> Hi, >>> I'm looking around for up to date instructions/wikis/howtos on how >>> to set up Samba on my CUPS server to allow me to print from Windows. >> >> I'm also interested in this; I tried it a while back (from both >> directions; printer hosted on linux and printer hosted on windows) and >> eventually gave up. The printer works fine locally on both machines. >> It's not a network printer (no print server) but just a plain old >> shared-on-the-netowork-while-attached-to-a-workstation printer. I'm >> not a CUPS or Samba expert at all so don't take my lack of success as >> to big of a discouragement. :) >> >> I'll be watching this thread closely and perhaps trying along with >> you, but for now I have nothing useful to add. >> >> Thanks, >> Paul > > I struggled and made this work sort of some years ago. Then we all > switched to Linux and it wasn't such an issue. Now however I have more > Windows boxes in the house and need to deal with this again so I'm > sort of stuck. > > I see Neil says he did it without Samba but I've never heard of that. > I thought the only way to make the cups stuff play on the network like > a Windows network was through cups. > > The first thread I point at in the forums was semi-interesting but > finishes earlier this year with people failing to make things work. > Not a good sign I think. > > I suppose if I bought a new network printer then maybe it wouldn't be > an issue but I don't have $300 to drop on that right now.
In my case I have a "winprinter", doesn't do anything without drivers, doesn't have native understanding of postscript or PCL or anything like that, isn't a network printer so it doesn't have its own IP address. Just a plain cheapo USB printer. Any printer sharing will have to go through the host machine, and it sounds like you're in the same boat as me. It's a USB printer so i just change the cable when i want to print, but that's not very elegant. It would be nice to just set it up and forget about it. In my case I've got a gentoo desktop, a windows XP/Vista dual-boot deskop and a gentoo/XP64 dual-boot laptop. I just found this page on Google about doing this with Debian and it looks fairly simple. It does use Samba. http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Debian-and-Windows-Shared-Printing/sharing_with_windows.html
