Samba printer sharing; making the printer visible to Windows...

[Neil Woolford]

Hi,

My Ubuntu box has the normal CUPS printing system, with the addition of the 
gimp-print drivers for my Epson Stylus CX3200.  The printer is installed as 
local printer on the USB port.  This works well when printing locally, but 
I would like to be able to share the printer with my laptop, running 
Windows 98.  (When I'm at work I use the shared printer on my Windows 2000 
workstation over the network from the laptop.)

I've set up physical networking and Samba.   I can browse the whole of the 
laptop from Ubuntu, and the laptop can see and read files in my one share, 
which is my home folder under Ubuntu.  As far as I know, this means that my 
password and user identity under windows are recognised as valid by Ubuntu 
for that share access.  (I set them up to match between systems, and did 
the smbpasswd thing as well.)

The problem is that the printer on the Ubuntu box is not visible to Windows 
98;  in contrast, the printer on the Windows 2000 workstation appears with 
the shared folders when I open the Network Places window and the 
appropriate computer within it.

I assume that the correct behaviour for a shared printer would be to 
'announce' itself as a share, in much the same way as shared folders 
do.  This just isn't happening from Ubuntu.

Am I right to expect this?  Or do I have to invoke the printer in some way?

The smb.conf file is the Ubuntu default as installed and seems to contain 
the references to cups that I'd expect to be there to set things up 
automatically.

I can find a lot of detailed Samba howtos, but the example configurations 
all look to be equivalent to what I already have.  One of the howtos even 
shows a Windows network places window with the shared printer icon 
alongside the shared folders, the result that I want...

Neil


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