samba printing to winprinter
 

I have a Xerox workcentre VE80 printer connected to a win98 box that I would like to print from my linux box. The printer is a windows only printer. I have samba set up and everything is working. When I tried to set up the printer as a samba printer in the printer setup of Mandrake 8.0 it always ask for printer drivers which I can not provide because there are no linux drivers for this printer. I have tried smbprint but I do not know how to set it up for this printer. Any suggestions?

This will probabely not work.

Windows printers are designed to print from Windows only. This means the printer itself is not very "smart". Most of the functionality comes from the Windows box. That's the reason why these types of printers are much cheaper than "general purpose" printers.

A network printer is comparable to a local printer. The only difference is, that it receives its data via the network in stead of via the parallel port. The whole processus of formatting the data an creating a format which is usable by the printer, is done on the client PC using the printer driver. This datafile is then send through the data channel (parallel port or network) to the printer. If you don't have a printer driver for a certain platform, you're not able to create such datafiles and you're not able to print to the printer.

If the formatting would happen on the server PC (the one to which the printer is connected), this PC would need to know all different file formats (doc, pdf, rtf, txt) to be able to create a printer file.

This won't help you much, but I'm affraid that's how the story goes...

network printer
 

An easy way to configure your remote printer is to use webmin. You also has to check that your lpd daemon is started, and that samba get the good print commands. Use full path for them, for instant:
print command = /usr/bin/lpr -r -P%p %s

Try out the webmin thingy, i made it work fine this way.