I have an HP1012 B/W Laser Printer, that I occassionally want to print to that is set up on another computer on my network as a shared printer on an XP Home OS (Custom Built Computer - Asus AZN8X Motherboard).

My other computer is running Suse Linux Rel Vers 10. It is working fine except for the printing. I hooked this computer up just to have access to the internet to my college or whatever.

Networked through a Linksys wired router using DHCP to auto-assign IP Addresses.

My questing is how to configure (SUSE 10) to be able to use the B/W HP 1012 laser printer.

I could move the printer to the Linux box if I can get the XP box to print to it.

I dont know much about Linux, and I would like to get it working so I can print from both computers to the laser. I realize I could just buy a print server, but it seems like it would not be necessary.

Any ideas would be useful.

If you want to put the printer on your Linux box, you can run Samba on your Linux box and offer it to all other machines on your network. With Samba, Linux can be a print server, e-mail server, pdc, or just another computer that can access windows machines and offer shares to the same machines. Here is the link to the Samba site: http://us1.samba.org/samba/

Read the Howto's from that site and come back here and ask questions and you will have the printer working in no time.

Good Luck

Cups and Samba is the way to go. Cups (Common unix printing system) can use Samba to send the print jobs to a Windows server, and it's easy to configure with a browser (localhost:631). Just share the printer in Windows the usual way.

Unix applications tend to print Postscript, and as the printer is not capable of that, hpijs package should make the necessary translation to PCL. Once installed, it should become selectable via Cups configuration. It's often installed by default, as are Cups and Samba.

There are various ways of doing this, and you could connect the printer to the Linux machine as well, if that's the one that is more often powered up. The above http port (631, also known as ipp, for Internet Printing Protocol) can also receive files to be printed from other hosts, and in Windows a remote printer can be configured that way. In your case the IP address of the print server host should be specified, and if they change...

I think SMB (Windows' native networking protocol) can handle host names instead of IP addresses, and Cups can use Samba, to allow it to work as an SMB print server. So it might be the protocol of choice in this direction as well. In any case, I would let the sending host format the document to the printer, and run the server in raw mode.

it is much simpler and easier just to set up a lpd server on the linux box and connect the printer to it. (Install the windows component "Unix Printing Service" or something like that)

May be this post will help. Reading the hole thread might help better.

-W

If your printer has both a USB and a parallel port, you may be able to connect both. I had a printer that was shared by a Fedora Core 4 PC and a Windows XP PC. I used the parallel port of the Fedora Core 4 machine and the USB port for the Windows machine. I do not know if this configuration will work with SuSE or your printer. If you do decide to get a print server, be sure to check the specifications, because some servers do not support Linux. You might also try to give the host PC a static IP address. Again, if you get a print server, give it a static IP address.
Good luck.