Dancing the SAMBA: An Introduction to Living with Windows
Linux as a Printer Server
So, how do you make Windows talk with our server? There are three
ways:
- Make Windows talk the standard lpd protocol with your printer
server. This is easy to set up (on the server side). Simply install the
cups BSD command support package for your distribution (In Debian, cupsys-bsd)
and enable the server in your inetd configuration. Then,
configure your Windows machine to use a network printer server as
described in your Windows documentation.
- Use Samba and share your printer the Windows way. A
HOWTO is available. You should use a Windows machine to upload the
drivers to the server and share it. The main problem with this approach
is that the processing is done on the client rather than the server,
and server dumps raw data to the printer. Sometimes, you would have to
disable bidirectional communication in the printer driver to enable
this mode.
- A hybrid approach. Use Samba and CUPS to share your printer as a
PostScript printer and supply a PostScript driver for Windows. A
HOWTO is available for this approach as well.
Alon
Altman