Samba madness

[Benjamin Scott]

On Sun, 9 Jan 2005, at 9:16pm, drew.vanzandt at gmail.com wrote:
> I'm having trouble getting a printer working network-wise at my in-law's
> house. ...

  There are two approaches to printer drivers and such with *nix and *doze.
One is to tell *nix to just pass the data unchanged, and use the specific
driver on *doze.  This is where Bill McGonigle's CUPS tip will be a huge.

  The other approach is to tell *doze that everything is a generic
PostScript printer, and then do print conversion on the final *nix host.  
This essentially makes *doze work just like most *nix applications do:
Output PostScript and assume it will work.

  Each approach has its benefits.  The PostScript-everywhere approach means
you never have to worry about client printer drivers.  Drivers, if they are
an issue at all, only become involved at the final printer attachment point.  
The downside is you loose any nifty custom print dialog features a native
driver might add.

  (FWIW, I generally use native Windows drivers and tell *nix to avoid doing
any processing (the former approach).)

  Another tip: When using the native driver on *doze: If you're not going to
use "point-and-print" (where you load a *doze driver onto the Samba server),
add the following line to your smb.conf file, in the [global] section:

	use client driver = yes

  That tells Samba to tell *doze not to even bother asking the server for
printer information.

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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