I'm very familiar with setting up a local printer in CUPS, thanks to things like printconf, foomatic-gui and KDE Print Controls it's rather a no brainer anyway.

Thing is, I've got a dual boot system, and one other computer stays strictly in MacOSX. So it gets to have the printer because I don't want to muck about with remembering to change the printer being used based on what OS the printer is fed from... to say nothing of 75% of all things needing printed come from the Mac anyway.

It's running CUPS 1.1.20rc1 (and NO, I WILL NOT UPGRADE IT... tried that already and it did BAD THINGS) with gutenprint 5.0 drivers for the HP DeskJet 882c on USB.

On the other side of several feet of cat5e I have debian etch with CUPS 1.2.2 (probably 1.2.3 next time I run apt... but whatever). Now the printer is working perfectly from the Mac, better than it does from the PC.

It's set to be shared, but I can't see it on SMB, so I guess I'll just get CUPS for Windows so that XP will also be able to talk to it, no biggie.

Problem is that I can print to it through IPP, but everything comes out complete garbage, a perfect train wreck of computer generated ANSI art from something that was supposed to be the standard test page from CUPS. This is with the default settings that were there before I even got a config tool loaded, if I used the hpijs drivers, gutenprint 5.0 drivers, or just said send raw.

I'd just set it up the hard way with a setting for the way WinXP shares it and makes it look and one for Linux and plug it back in over here, but I'm worried that I'd just wind up with the same problem, only from the Mac's jobs instead.

I may not know the answer but can you sketch the setup
eg

dual boot pc------------XP
|-------------- Etch

dual boot ethernet card--------hub----------MAC
.............................................|
............................................printer

change the hub to kvm switch etc to suit?

Oh, forgoto to post about that.... I got to working it out in XP to get CUPS installed when I discovered that the windows part of cups.org is to get stuff to route samba print requests to the .... Anyway, it wasn't actually CUPS for Win, it was CUPS from win.

Did some experimenting and fixed it by putting it back on the dual boot and making Linux and Windows call the print queue the same thing and then told OSX to print from SMB.