What are the steps to setting up a linux print server to be available for Windows clients?

Specifically, what additional software needs to be on the linux server (Samba? Cups? Etc?) and what are the settings for the windows clients?

Thanks!

hi, we at our studentresidence use cups as print server.

googling cups tutorial, i found this:

http://mumford1.dyndns.org/~bs7452/linuxhelp/

it's a nice mini links-collection abbout cups.

have a while,

leg

Thank you. That site is informative, however it covers printing from linux to windows.

How do I configure a windows client to send printing information to the linux print server? What are the settings in samba? CUPs? And on the Windows box?

Echo Kilo,

What you want to do shouldn't be too complicated (famous last words) and you'll use Samba server to do it.

First, you'll need to make sure that Samba server is running. Next, locate the smb.conf file and open it in your favorite editor. The smb.conf file has two major sections, global settings and share definitions. In the global settings section you need to configure things to establish basic connectivity and make sure the Windows machine(s) can see the Linux box. The share definitions section is where you'll configure things to share your printer. Below is a basic printer share lifted from my smb.conf (of course, you'll need to change certain lines):

While all the lines above are important the last one, use client driver = yes, is especially so as it greatly simplifies the driver install issue. Including that line will make sure that you are prompted to install the Windows driver on the Windows machine when you add the printer on the Linux box to your Windows machine. When you're doing configuring, run testparm from the command line to see if you have any problems then restart Samba server and check the results.

I realize the above is very general and lacks detail but it should get you going. The smb.conf files vary from distro to distro- in Slackware 11.0 the documentation withing smb.conf practically walks you through the process, while in other distros you get very little in the way of help.

An excellent source of information is www.samba.org. While Samba configuration can be immensely complicated a basic configuration is actually pretty simple. If you've never worked with Samba before I'd advise going with a simple configuration to begin with then playing with it as your knowledge grows. Hint: make a copy of the current smb.conf before changing anything- that way, if things go south, you always the original smb.conf to start over with.

If you have trouble just come back here and we'll help you through it.