We installed Ubuntu on my computer yesterday. My son still has WinXP and he had the computers networked so he was able to use my printer. This is our first experience with Linux.

Today, it won't work. We've checked the settings and we can't see any reason why it shouldn't work.

He suspects that if he installs Ubuntu on his computer so they're both running Linux, it will be a lot easier. We never had a problem when both computers had WinXP.

Would it be easier with both computers on the same OS, or is that just wishful thinking on his part?

That depends on what the problem is - if the problem was with WinXP (unlikley given your previous experience with 2 XP boxes) then yes. Otherwise, not likely.

Did you see any error messages or did it just seem to time out? On the Linux box, there should be a printer daemon log in the /var/log/cups directory. Can you check that and post any error messages that you find please?

My son doesn't know how he got it to work last night - he was just fiddling with the settings and suddenly it worked. He was able to print from the network connection.

Today he wasn't able to see me at all until I changed my settings in Samba to allow everybody to see me. Now he can see me and the printer, but when he tries to access the printer he gets a 403 Forbidden page.

We looked at the error logs, but today's is empty. The last entries are from last night before I put the new Ubuntu into hibernate and when everything was working. My son doesn't think these error messages are relevant because they were from yesterday, but I'll post them anyway:

E [28/Jan/2008:23:00:02 -0500] Resume-Printer: Unauthorized
E [28/Jan/2008:23:02:07 -0500] Resume-Printer: Unauthorized
E [28/Jan/2008:23:45:27 -0500] DNSServiceRegister failed with error -65537

Unfortunately the messages don't provide much extra info (although maybe someone else will be reading this and recognise them).

The info at http://www.linuxprinting.org/~till/p...orial/tut.html might help, but it will be slow going. Printing under Linux has always been one extreme or the other for me. It either goes perfectly straight away or takes an hour of wading through problems.