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Network Printing

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by suzanne

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I used to use unix about 10 years ago and have forgotten heaps. I now am setting up a linux box to use as a print server in our office.
We have two printers (Lexmark Optra SC1275 colour laser and Lexmark 4079) and one plotter (Hp Designjet 2500CP). All are postscript printers. The Laser & Designjet both have network cards in them, the 4079 plugs into LPT1.
The question is: How do I set up Linux to print to these printers and then share them with Windows NT/2000 users? I have Samba installed so I assume I use that.
Currently the users have a batch file - they print to file then use "copy file \\pcname\queue" to print. It would be useful to continue this as 1 plot file may be re-used many times.
On the laser I can send a text file to it, but when I send a postscript file it vanishes into a black hole.
Any ideas? Is there a utility to do this for me?

3 replies

by mckaytech

I had a situation that was sort of along the same lines. I used RedHat Linux; it has a printer configuration utility called PrintTool (go figure!) and it's pretty straightforward. Once I got all the local and network printers working from Linux, Ithen configured the smb.conf file to share those printers to Windows workstations.

The printer section of smb.conf looks like this:
# NOTE: If you have a BSD-style print system there is no need to
# specifically define each individual printer
[printers]
comment = All Printers
path = /var/spool/samba
browseable = no
# Set public = yes to allow user 'guest account' to print
guest ok = no
writable = no
printable = yes

At this point, it should look pretty much like an NT shared printer from the workstation's point of view.

paul

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