I'm a total n00b setting-up a lightweight SlackWare 11 server to serve several networked HP printers for Windows NT and later clients. This server will replace a SW 8 box whose hardware has aged to the point where I'm getting nervous about it. The SW 8 box uses Samba and LPRng.

Did I mention that I'm setting-up a lightweight SlackWare 11 box? I'm not bothering with installing X.

When I look at the huge volumes of info on http://www.linuxprinting.org, it seems to spend a lot if time and effort telling me how to make a non-PostScript printer work via CUPS to print from a GUI-based application. My needs are much simpler than that.

Can anyone direct me how to configure a minimal network print spooler?

lprng is still supported in slack 11. Have a look in /pasture

As for the fiddling and farting around with CUPS. That will
heavily depend on your printer-model and can be eased by installing
the foomatic-stuff.


Cheers,
Tink

I have file and print servers running Slack11 with Samba and CUPS on Pentium MMX boxes with 4GB hard drives. I did not install KDE, but use xfce4 as a GUI interface for file management and use Firefox as well as the command line tools for CUPS administration. This has been a very stable and hassle free setup. The best guides are the official Samba and CUPS manuals. HP printers are well supported by CUPS and in a network environment CUPS is definitely superior to lprng.

OK, How is it superior? I realize that neither LRPng, nor CUPS, nor any third alternative (is there an alternative?) will heavily tax a Linux host, especially one that's doing nothing but print spooling.

When I say "light-weight" I'm concerned with keeping my task list small and minimizing the time and effort it will take me to set-up the system.

What I'd like to know to make my primary config decision is: What more functionality will CUPS give me for the effort of learning how to configure it properly. I don't need it to handle PostScript rasterization; the printers themselves are handling that chore. I don't need it to make PDFs; I've already got Adobe Acrobat Distiller on the network. I don't need print-to-fax; I've got a fax machine with a network jack already. What else can CUPS or some other print spooling systems do for me?

Thanx in advance,

-dP

Not sure, I guess you gotta read the manuals on each and see if they do what you want them to do.

Why not try lprng and see if it works alright, if not, use CUPS.

One nice feature of CUPS which I really like is the ability to make a CUPS printing server's printer automagically appear in other CUPS-enabled computers (I understand that it includes Mac OSX). Of course, this feature can be turned off or limited to a(some) subnet(s)

Also there's a way to make Windos XP/2K use CUPS without the need to have Samba running (I don't remember exactly how, but you had to make Windos use IPP -which it DOES support out of the box-. You'll have to look it up in the internet, it wasn't that hard). So all your printing would go through IPP and file sharing through SMB.

CUPS has a huge bunch of (maybe useless) options. Some of these may actually make your job easier.

Also you can have your CUPS server host the printer drivers so that they can be installed on demand by the Windows clients.
Samba is the tool for connecting Windows clients to Linux systems, and CUPS is the print spooler best supported by Samba.

OK, I've made my decision.

CUPS seems to be too intimately linked into the current Samba package, so I've implemented a CUPS-based print server.