Samba printer sharing; making the printer visible toWindows...

[neil woolford]

On Wed, 2005-11-02 at 20:35 -0500, 'Forum Post wrote:
> Neil Woolford Wrote: 

 
> 
> > 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. 

> 
> > The problem is that the printer on the Ubuntu box is not visible to
> > Windows 
> 
> > 98;
> 

It appears that anything before windows 2000 needs extra software to
enable IPP printing.  (Printer with an internet address, effectively.)

I've added it to my Windows 98SE but still no joy.

The printer can be shared happily if I run Ubuntu at the laptop end, and
shows up with the ip address of the machine that it is attached to...
 

> 
> > 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.

For Windows 98, but see above for Ubuntu.

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

There does seem to be a command 'cupsaddsmb' which is supposed to export
cups printers to samba.  I haven't got it to do anything yet :(

I suspect that Samba isn't announcing the printer, and that Ubuntu on
the laptop is finding it by a different method.
> 
> > 
> 

> > 
> 
> > 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

Maxwellcom (forum) wrote;
> 
> 
> 
> I would like to do the very same thing... did you ever figure out how?
> 
> maxwellcom

Answer;  not yet.   As USB is hot pluggable and I don't print much at
home I'm currently putting up with crawling around swapping plugs if I
need to print from Windows.

I do plan to have another look, but may just change the laptop over to
Ubuntu only fairly soon anyway.

Neil