I know there are many posts here already related to this, but I'm a n00b and couldn't get much out of them.

I recently switched from XP to Ubuntu 7.10 on my computer, and I would like to share a USB-printer (HP Photosmart 7760). Three other computers will be using the printer, two XP and one Vista.

The printer works fine locally, but I have no idea how to share it.

Your help and patience is much appreciated.

From you rpost it is not clear on which system you have the printer installed. It will work on a linux system. Here is the link that describes the driver you need.

http://openprinting.org/show_printer...hotoSmart_7660

The process in linux is different to share, depending if the linux system is the print server ( printer attached to linux ) or print client, ( printer attached to windoze system ).

If your printer is attached to Ubuntu, do you have cups installed ? If not, then install cups, and make sure you can print locally.

If you added the printer through some of the features in Ubuntu, you may still have cups installed. To find out, open a web browser, and in the location bar type http://localhost:631 If cups is installed, you will connect to the web interface for managing your printers. It should show your printer on the printer tab.

Once your printer works to your system with cups, you can share it to the network.

The rest of the work gets done from your clients. On each system go through adding a printer, this time it will be a network printer. You need the name of the printer, that is in the cups configuration, you name it when you install it in cups. You may also need the device URI. This is explained in the Cups documents and is different for different printers. You can find that information in the cups Help/Documents page. Look for Device URI. I can't tell you exactly what you need there, since I don't have your printer.

Hope this helps.

The printer is connected to the computer running Ubuntu. When I installed Ubuntu, the printer was added automatically. When I first tried to share it, I opened "Printing" under the System/Administration tab, and checked the "Shared"-box. And CUPS says the printer is published, so that's good.

But I'm having trouble adding the printer on the Windows-clients. If I search for printers, no printers are found, although the name of the printer server comes up (but no printer seems to be connected to it).
If I type in the address directly (\\servername\printername) it asks me for a username and password, which I don't know. My Ubuntu username and password doesn't work.

Any suggestions?

Brain check, on my part. Sorry, I omitted to say you need Samba installed and configure on linux to share out the printer.

Samba is easy enough to install, but can be a problem to get configured. Once installed you will have a file called /etc/samba/smb.conf This is the main configuration file for samba. At this point you need to do some thinking about security in your network and how you want to control logging on, users etc. There is no simple answer here, but many things to consider.

If all you need is for any windoze user to be able to print, and have no security issues, then a simple set up will work. BTW don't blame linux for the many confusing options. You can thank Mr Bill for that mess.

There are some tutorials that can help here, or I can post a 'simple' file you could start with. I'm no expert at samba, but I can get it to work in most cases.

Get samba installed and we'll go from there.

Samba is installed, as far as I can see.