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Printing to shared Linux printers via CUPS
Authored by: MattHaffner on Sep 30, '03 02:27:52PM

Normally, you don't even have to do this. Here at work our deptarment's 10+ printers all show up on my PowerBook without any work on my part. Make sure the 'Show printers connected to other computers' button in the Preferences of Print Center and any CUPS printers on your subnet should appear automatically. When you use a Print dialog box, there will be a 'Shared Printers >' submenu below your manually added printers in the Printer pulldown menu. If you want one of the shared printers to always be in your primary list as well, just make sure it has the checkbox checked next to it in Print Center.

If it doesn't show up, your CUPS server may not be configured for broadcasting/sharing (but this is normally the default setting for a CUPS distribution). Check the /etc/cups/cupsd.conf file on the Linux server and explore the Browse* options (particularly the BrowseInterval option). You can find more information on setting these in the CUPS admin documentation, conveniently located on any CUPS-enabled machine (like OS X):

http://localhost:631/sam.html

If your printer(s) is(/are) located on different subnets, you can use the method described in the tip, or if you want to use CUPS browsing system, you'll need to tweak the /etc/cups/cupsd.conf file on your OS X machine by uncommenting and editing the BrowsePoll line to include the server machine's address.

One final note... Unfortunately, you may not be able to print to a shared Linux CUPS printer with some Adobe products (PS and Illustrator, especially). The current version of these apps still send print jobs out as PICT encapsulated postscript (also tagged as "pictwps"), and the Linux CUPS does not have a proper filter for this data type. The easiest solution is to bypass the CUPS server if the printer is connected via Ethernet by manually adding a printer in Print Center. Of course you loose all the benefits of group queue reporting, accounting, etc. if you do this. The real fix has already been incorporated into the latest CUPS software release, if I read thing correctly, by pre-processing the output on OS X before sending to the remote server. I haven't personally tried to get this working under OS X though. Maybe this will be fixed in Panther, although it may cease to be a problem in newer versions of the applications as well, especially if they go Cocoa instead of Carbon.



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Same thing here - no config rqd.
Authored by: gxw on Sep 30, '03 08:48:29PM

I have a Mandrake installation with CUPS installed and a Laserjet 6L on the parallel port. This printer auto-magically showed up in the print center on OS X without me having to do any configuration at all on OS X. The configuration on Linux. box was just to install a laserjet 6 driver (the driver is actually a laserjet4+ghostscript driver - it was the recommended choice of when I installed Mandrake).

It's sweet the way it works.



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