Hi Everybody,

I am having difficulty in sharing my printer in my home network.
I have an HP Deskjet attach to my Slackware box and use it as the local printer just fine, but I want to share it with another Linux box and my windows laptop. I am connecting via DCHP so I get a new IP address each time I boot.

My question is two parts:

1. I have not been able to share this printer with either of the other two computers (Linux or Windows) in Slackware because I cannot find the file to configure it as a network share printer. How do I enable printer sharing in Slackware?

2. I am able to share the printer in Fedora just fine, but I have to change the location of the printer (IP address) on the other Linux box each time I reboot, which I do not have to do from the Windows laptop (seems to just "find" it). Is there a way (short of assigning static IP addresses) to enable the other Linux box to "find" the printer on the network without having to alter the IP address each reboot?

As always. thank you for your help.

Bob

Hi Bob (again!),

If you're wanting to share a printer with both Linux and Win32 systems, have a google around (and also search this forum) for "Samba" -- the *nix version of "Windows File and Print Sharing". There's a cornucopia of how-tos and tutorials out there, and it sounds like what you're looking for (particularly when you say "...which I do not have to do from the Windows laptop...").

Samba is included with Slack on CD#1, series n.

Hi,

Thanks again for your response. I guess my question was too limited. I have samba installed and NFS is work fine on the the little network I have at home. The results of testparm -v are this:

[Printer]
path = /dev/usb/lp0
guest ok = Yes
case sensitive = No
msdfs proxy = no

These same conf settings work fine in FC4 and I can access the printer from either the laptop or the other linux box, which is Ubuntu btw. I do have to change the ipp: address to the printer each time I reboot, but other than that it works fine. When I try this in Slack (even with these conf settings), I get no error messages and everything appears to proceed and the printer does not respond. Nothing wrong with the printer because it prints locally fine.

Any thopughts?

Thanks again,

Bob

You also probably need to have CUPS set up on the print server machine. There is a CUPS configure file that you need to modify to enable printing from Windows. Look at /etc/cups/mime.convs and this line:

#application/octet-stream application/vnd.cups-raw 0

I think that is the one that needs to be uncommented. You will probably need to install the Windows driver for your printer on the Windows machine and set Samba to use CUPS printing and "raw" from Windows. This may be a bit outdated, but the smbd.conf (samba) example should describe what you need.

Thanks for the replies. Never did get it to work, so I guess I will cash this one in and just use Fedora when I want to print from the other machines. No amount of tweaking in samba or NFS helped. Not a firewall problem, checked that. Oh well, first failure in Slack...try again another day when I get a little more experience under my belt.

Thanks again,

Bob

Printer sharing is supposed to work semi-automatically using IPP. I think that all it took was to tell the cups on the client box to poll the server. ESR wrote up a bad design rant having to do with this.