I have a PI 166mhz with 32mb of ram and a base install of debian 3.0r0. I was wondering what type of software would be needed to allow it to act as a print server on my home lan. It needs to be able to print from a linux machine and two windows machines. Would a combination of CUPS and samba get the job done? Any advice on how to set it up? Thanks.

ya both CUPS and samba will do

For anyone else in my position this link has been helpful so far:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/doc...hared-Printing

Okay. Well here's the an update and a question. I got CUPS and Samba installed on my printserver and everything configured locally just dandy. I can print stuff off on the printserver fine. I got the windows 98 machine hooked up and it prints off of the print server fine. The windows XP fisher price addition can see the samba work group, has correctly configured it's printer as a networked one but when I try to print it says (in XP) access deined unable to connect.

The samba logs say this:

printing/printing.crint_job_start(952)
print_job_start: insufficient permissions to open spool file
/home/smbprint/smbprn.000058.dkRSeg.

I configured samba to print using a public account called smbprint as directed to in the printing guide above. This is the important stuff far as I can tell out of my /etc/samba/smb.conf.

[Global]

printcap name = cups
printing = cups
security = share
encrypt passwords = true

[printers]

browseable = yes
path = /home/smbprint
printable = yes
public = yes
writable = no
create mode = 0700
guest only = yes
guest account = smbprint

I left the rest of the config file stock. Has anyone ran into this problem before? Should I abandon the public account samba configuration and just create a user on the printserver for each computer? Please help and thanks in advance.

Well, once again no one has replied with any type of help so far for my current problem. (Props to jayakrishnan for getting me headed in the right direction). Here's the current situation. I decided that the howto I mentioned earlier was pretty much worthless for any real world work considering how it used one account with no password for printing. Boom, rm /etc/samba/smb.conf time to start all over. Here's my current smb.conf

[global]
workgroup = homelan
security = share
encrypt passwords = yes
printing = cups
printcap name = cups
load printers = yes
log file = /var/log/samba-log.%m
lock directory = /var/log/samba

[printers]
comment = All Printers
security = server
path = /var/spool/cups
browseble = no
printable = yes
read only = yes
guest only = yes
writable = no
guest okay = yes
create mode = 0700

All windows machine have corresponding samba accounts with the same username and password as well as entries in smbpasswd with the same username and password. Windows 98 works flawlessly once again but Windows XP home has the same proble, access deined, unable to connect. After my new configuration the logs for the XP machine don't show any error at all. XP does not have the firewall activated. smb.conf passes a testparm. I have read the howtos, (Net,Printing,SMB) I have tried a google.com/linux. Somone please help! Does anyone know how I can get an error message? Are there XP logs I can check? Should put some tinfoil on my head and dance around while ouuga booga to appease the fickle XP gods? Any suggestions, options, hatemail welcome at this point... please!