I have a printer on an XP machine. All my other Win machines can print to it OK. I can mount drive shares from Linux to XP OK.

I have installed a SAMBA network printer via YAST2 and it has the correct driver for my Printer, and quite happily discover the XP machine as a SAMBA server and discovered which shares it had available. Cool so far.

When I try to print anything including using the Test print buttons in YAST the print goes into the queue that I made for the printer, and just sits there until I delete it. there appears to be no attempt to send the print to to the XP machine, no error messages are generated, it just sits there indefinitly looking like this -

linux:~ # lpq
epson is ready and printing
Rank Owner Job File(s) Total Size
active pete 2 Untitled 136192 bytes

How do I go about trouble shooting this?

Cheers

Is there really no-one here who undertstands Linux well enough to even point me in right direction? Strange.

OK.

Its just a shot in the dark.

Printing to a HP on a W2K, I had to include username and password of a W2K user in the smb-path of the printer.
It looks like that:

smb://WORKGROUP/usernameassword@W2Kmachine/PRINTERNAME

where the smilie is: ":" and "p" without any spaces.

This may be a first try. And then, i used cups, since i had troubles with yast's printersetup. But this should not mess it us at all...

ajk

Good suggestion, I have definitely set up a correct username and password, and the YaST printer setup asks for it during the printer setup process, but prehaps its not saving the config properly or something.
Hmm.

I found another way to install a printer, using the KDE print box dialogue, so I tried this in case it was YaST doing something wrong, and the exact same thing happens.

I can set it up to print to a file, and hey presto! theres the file everytime. But try printing to a samba share and it no-way hosay.

The smb: etc config line you showed here is obviously part of the cups config, I have no idea where this config is held or what its called, I'll go investigate and see if anything in the config look out of wack.

Any pointer here would be appreciated.

Thanks!

To anyone who is interested here's the deal -

If you are sharing a printer on an XP machine the URI for your samba printer must look like this -

smb://userassword@server/share_name

which you will think is obvious, but there are a couple of funnies in here.

1st as a long time windows user I'm used to \\cartman\epson being the same as \\100.100.10.1\epson, given that cartman=100.100.10.1. In windows if you type an ip address like that as part of a machine name its clever enough to twig that its an address not a name so don't bother trying to resolve it. But linux thinks 100.100.10.1 is a Netbios name - good job! So the server MUST go in as a name not an IP. As I have no DNS I just stuck an entry in the hosts file.

2nd, for XP the guest user does not appear to have access to the printer, which on reflection is fair enough, but it took me a while to work it out. I have used the user/pass of my default XP user, otherwise you have to add a new user and you get the annoying user selection screen on bootup.

Pretty newbie stuff I know but it might help someone else!