Just finished setting up a printing scheme involving
a shared printer connected to a Win2K box and a
printer connected to a Linux box running Samba.

Everything works well and I can print to either printer
from either machine. I can see the Linux box printer
from Win2K and can see the Win2K shared printer
in Linux using 'smbclient -L win2kbox'.

I'm not sure I understand this completely, but I have
set up TCP/IP printing on the Windows box so I can
print directly from Linux using the lpd setup:

lpd://win2kbox/printersharename.

This printer definition appears as another printer when
viewed in 'My Network Places' on Win2K.

A perusal of many documents discussing the setup of
a print scheme from a Linux box to a Win box indicates
that the correct use of Samba to facilitate this connection
is to use the printer setup command:

smb://win2kbox/printersharename.

I have also seen discussions of using ipp:, http:, etc.
In fact 'lpinfo -v' reveals:

network socket
network http
network ipp
network lpd
network smb

Can anyone explain the actual differences in the use of
these various connection types and whether or not any
or all of them actually use Samba in some fashion?

Or is Samba actually unnecessary for some of these?

TIA

Cups will print directly to the Win printer via samba. Simply set the printer up to point at a smb://<host>/<print share> URI. LPD is another method of acheiving the same end, but Windows doesn't support this method by default. As you have samba up and working, might as well use it!

Well, the question is whether I can do this w/o Samba?