printing over the network

[anarcholinuxism]

I want to send all the print jobs from my Redhat machine to a printer on a windows machine elsewhere on my network. I was wondering how and if I should use samba to do this.

I'm no samba expert, I've only just managed to get my home directory available from the windows machines but if I do

[me@rh8 me]$smbclient -L win98

I get

added interface ip=192.168.0.254 bcast=192.168.0.255 nmask=255.255.255.0
Got a positive name query response from 192.168.0.10 ( 192.168.0.10 )
Password:

Sharename Type Comment
--------- ---- -------
PRINTER$ Disk
XEROX Printer
WIN A Disk
C Disk

Xerox being the printer i want to print to.

Any URLs gratefully received.

[nouse66]

setting up printing with 'cups' was't too hard for me.
cups has a web interface for administering printers. http://localhost:631/

from there you add a printer and set it to use the smb interface instead of a local port.

the hardest part for me was getting the authentication becuase i was connecting to a windows 2000 machine. my printer path (smb://user:password@server/share) ended up being smb://aaron@nash/epson

[hlrguy]

You don't need samba to do this. In redhat, unless you changed to cups, if you bring up 'Prining', you can simply add the printer. It will ask you for the type, select windows printer. It will then ask for the SMB shares for the windows machine. After that, select a printer and you should be up and running (assuming you have connectivity). If you have already converted to CUPS, then the same thing applies, although I find the SMB configuration in cups a little more cryptic.

You can easily switch betweem CUPS and LPR with Extras-->System Settings-->Printer Switching Tool. Refer to tour documentation CD for all the details.

Hmmm, Xerox printer...let me check something...yes, there about 25 Xerox printers listed to choose from. Hope yours is one of them.

hlrguy

[anarcholinuxism]

Thanks for all that information, very useful and I managed to get some communication going last night with lpd but nothing intelligible coming out of the printer. (I've been here before many years ago I seem to remember).

I am now using the Cups Config tool in the browser and am being prompted for the URI of the printer; smb is "helpfully" already filled in, in the dialogue box, but none of the examples below the box give me any clue as to the format the URI should take for a samba printer.

[anarcholinuxism]

hola!

well I've managed to print a testpage using Cups, but I don't seem to be able to print from OpenOffice or Mozilla, is there something I haven't done yet?

[hlrguy]

When you went from LPR to CUPS, you did run the switching tool correct? CUPS and LPR are mutually exlusive. Possibly, the others are still printing to the lpr sppol?

hlrguy

[anarcholinuxism]

I think I did it correctly

i get this -

[root@rhirvken sean]# /sbin/service cups status
cupsd (pid 1237) is running...
[root@rhirvken sean]# /sbin/service lpd status
lpd is stopped

should my packages print via cups automatically the, or will I need to do some extra configuration?

[hlrguy]

No, looks like you did it correctly. Have you tried OpenOffice printer config. Mozilla sometimes needs to be shutdown/restarted and for the latest thing I did, truetype in Mozilla, I actually had to reboot for all fonts to show as truetype.

try kedit and play with it there. It is small and light. If it is picking up the name of the printer your selected but still not working, then something is going on under the skin.

If you have already restarted the computer, then I don't know.

hlrguy

[anarcholinuxism]

No, although the test prints are put through to the windows machine OK, I still can't get any packages to print to it. The selected printer for the Mozilla Print tool is "lpr", which I'm not sure is right, and the tool in open office is "Generic Printer", I can't find a printer config utility in Open Office either.:confused:

[hlrguy]

In both openoffice and kedit, I get a pulldown and my printer, as I named in in cups, is available. The 'generic' option is the one displayed when I first open the print dialoge in oo though. Abiwork shows lpr. In Openoffice, the printer settings are under File-->Printer Setup. I don't know why your configured printer is not in the pulldowns...

hlrguy