CUPS printing hints on Jaguar

Aug 24, '02 08:22:29PM

Contributed by: bax

Jaguar includes "CUPS" as printing system. This enables automatic printer browsing for remote machines, printer sharing etc. If you've got a Linux machine with CUPS running besides your Mac, you are able to print to all anchient printers, where the manufacturer doesn't provide an OSX driver to. (LinuxPrinting.org)

Hint: cupsomatic seems to fail for me when getting a PDF job from my mac. Changing debug to "1" (my debug="1") in cupsomatic helps.

To enable printing from Jaguar via Samba to Windows machines, you've got to include "smbspool" as cups backend. Grab Terminal as root and enter:

 % cd /usr/libexec/cups/backend
% ln -s /usr/bin/smbspool smb
Now reboot (or restart cups by "kill -HUP"). Print Center cowardly refuses to add SMB printers. So grab your favorite browser and enter "http://127.0.0.1:631" as URL. Go to printers, add a printer, and use "Windows Printer via SAMBA" as Device. The printer URL may be one of the following, depending on your environment (see cups documentation):
smb://user:pass@workgroup/server/sharename
smb://server/sharename
Unfortunately, the number of printer drivers included with cups is quite low and the usual MacOS X vendor drivers are not updated yet. If you don't find your model listed, consider gimp-print. You need the Developer Tools to compile and install gimp-print.

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20020824202229751