When I looked at the smb.conf file I noticed that the printer command
specified the printer with the print option -P %p. I just figured that
seeing that they had a variable there that Samba was somehow smart enough
to select a printer, any printer. The concept seemed kind of fuzzy in my
head, but the documentation said that it was not necessary to specify
individual printers. What I did seeing that I named my printer lp so that
the printing subsystem would assume that it was the default printer, was to
take out the -P option altogether. If I where to ever rename the printer
or add another printer i would assume (not tested) that I should ignore the
part of the doc that threw me off in the first place and create individual
entries for each printer queue. (I would have to do more research into
cups, but it seems that I should be able to set up a shared queue if I had
more than one printer of the same type that I wanted to distribute the load
across them.) This does bring up another question in that by taking out
the -o raw option I was able to get something to my printer. So between
those two items (automatic printer finding and the raw option) the solution
that I came up with does not make perfect sense to me, but it seems to
work.
> I recently hooked a HP 672C to my Linux box. When the printer is hooked
> directly to my Linux box it prints ok. When the printer is hooked
> directly into my Windows ME box, it prints good. When I hook the
> printer into my Linux box and then try to print over the network from my
> Windows ME box, all is not well. When I tried to print with the default
> print settings in the smb.conf file, I got a bunch of garbage which was
> expected (default is set to use a postscript filter, but I was using the
> HP supplied drivers). When I switched lines commented out in the
> smb.conf file so that 'raw' mode was selected and restarted Samba I
> could no longer get anything to print out from Windows ME, but I could
> still print locally. I tried to toggle back to the default mode in the
> smb.conf file and got garbage as expected. I then switched again to
> 'raw' mode and was back to nothing. I also looked for a 'Generic
> Postscript Driver' for Windows ME, but I never found such a beast. I
> thumbed through the CUPS doc and even though it gave better insight onto
> how to use CUPS, I failed to find anything wrong with how things where
> set up in the smb.conf file. (BTW I already have user level file
> services working between the boxes with the Linux box as the file server
> with the use of Samba.) Any advice would be appreciated.
