And the lucky winner is.... DEBIAN.
okay, so i am not sure if this is the best place ot have this question, but here goes....

In our lab, we have a handful of pc's and a handful of HPs with one printer hooked up to our lan. My job is to get the printer up and running on one of the HPs running debian.
I went through and with the apt-cache grabbed a bunch of what i assume are all i need for cups to work.
onto the rattling questions; the printer.conf file. is this file from teh printer server side, and am i supposed to modify this on my linux box so it will accept ips from the boxes i want to print (i.e. the same box i am on). The printer is not wired directly to any computer, but i do have an ip for it, so that isn't a problem finding that.
Also, at what point and where do i enter in the ip of the printer?
Forgive me if i am unclear or missing something, but my brain is frazzled.
As much info as there is on cups, none of it seems to fit what i need exactly. Thanks for the help
Jason

UPDATE: FORGET ALL THIS. The whole question stemmed from me having trouble getting the localhost page to run on my machine. once that worked, i set up teh printer w/ absolutely no problem whatsoever.

So, for the rest of us reading, how did you get it working?

well, the issue i had getting to the localhost page was just due to the browser i was using. The big thing i found after hours of searching (maybe some of you know immediately b/c you are smarter than me) was that the ip of the printer is added when it asks you for the http/socket, etc. I entered socket://my_ip and it worked right there.