Sharing a printer on a windows machine
 

Hi everyone. I'm fairly new to Linux, but I'm enjoying it a lot already. My system is running Mandrake 8 with no problems. There are two other machines running Win98 on our LAN. On one of the Win98 boxes our printer(Epson Stylus 600) is hooked up. I want to be able to print from my Linux system to the printer on the Win98 system. I'm pretty sure Samba is the way to go, but I'm a bit lost on which system it needs to be installed on and how to go about setting it up. Any advice?

Thanks a lot, and I look forward to many great advenures with Linux :).

well, you share the printer in network niegherehgboohood in windoze, and then use the samba client 'smbprint' under linux. i've not used smbprint before, but it should be pretty straight forward if you check the man page for it.

sharing windows printer
 

I'm trying to solve the same problem, so when you know, please tell me. The KDE KUPS program actually has a selection for an "SMB/Windows" printer, but it is greyed out on my install. The KUPS documentation I could find said this feature should function if the smbclient is running. It's running, but no share.

I've spent a fair amount of time trying to set up smbprint to work, but so far no luck.

more re windows printer
 

Sorry, I should proof-read my posts, I don't know what I meant by "no share." :)

To mention a bit more about Samba -- Samba was part of my Icepack install, and took just a bit of tweaking to set it up.

Samba reads the NetBios information from your windows computer. KDE has an "smbbrowser" that makes it easy to find other computers, it's like network neighborhood.

Samba runs on TCP/IP, so your that has to be running on your network and your computers have to have IP numbers to be found. Generally, you would want a computer serving as a browse server, but if you know the IP, you can find your windows computer.

I'm running exactly that way, with a printer that's on a Win98SE box serving as my printer for the Linux box. Here's the complete content of my /etc/cups/printers.conf file:

# Printer configuration file for CUPS v1.1.10
# Written by cupsd on Tue Dec 4 03:51:06 2001
<DefaultPrinter HP540>
DeviceURI smb://JKP133@ARI/JKP133/540_133
State Idle
Accepting Yes
JobSheets none none
</Printer>

The DeviceURI line is the address of the Win98SE box, and the printer's share name is 540_133. The rest of it should be pretty self-explanatory.

I've forgotten, now, whether I had to do anything else to make things work. There are a number of lines in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf at the end that specify a number of URLs associated with this but they may have been generated automatically, since they include a couple that I would not have created manually (making the printer accessible from the Internet except for the fact that the firewall blocks the address it's using).

printer
 

I think this should be pretty easy. I would just go to the printer config utility and add a printer. Select the type as SMB and then enter the IP of the windows machine and the name of the printer share. That should be all you have to do. I am up to Mandrake 8.2 now so I don't remember exact details.

Figured it out
 

I eventually was able to get it working via the CUPS web utility(localhost:631), and sent the path to the printer as smb://[name of machine printer is on]/[printer share name] and it worked right away. Just had to make sure that KDE was trying to print thru CUPS and not LPD.


Thanks to all those who helped me out.