Network printing
I really like Jon Udell's consistent approach of applying the scientific method to design problems. Based on the response to Eric's sharing of his install woes for a CUPS printer, you would think that Macs are orders of magnitude easier to install a network printer than on Unix. Jon chose to test that assertion, and the results are no where near conclusive.
As luck would have it, less than a month ago I
penned the words
CUPS and Samba
were simple to set up with webmin. While I had had some
previous experience with Samba, I had never heard of CUPS or webmin
before that date.
Time to give something back.
You see, while it is true that Aunt Tillie doesn't
know how to install a network printer, it is also true that she
doesn't know how to connect up the RCA cables on her VCR to her
television. But she does have a niece or nephew that
does. And if you are reading this, you probably are that
niece or nephew.
That means that you do know how to use Google. You know that the web is full of pages like this one and this one.
In my case, my wife is running Windows XP, and my file and print server is running Debian Linux. While I did initially bootstrap this process using KDE's menus, webmin, and Google, I distilled the process down to the following commands:
apt-get --yes install cupsys cupsys-bsd cupsys-client foomatic-filters-ppds lpadmin -p IBM4312 -D "IBM Network Printer 12" -L Office -v parallel:/dev/lp0 -P /usr/share/cups/model/foomatic-ppds/Generic/Generic-PCL_4_Printer-laserjet.ppd.gz /usr/bin/enable IBM4312 /usr/sbin/accept IBM4312 # lp /usr/share/cups/data/testprint.ps apt-get --yes install samba patch /etc/samba/smb.conf /home/setup/patch/smb.conf /etc/init.d/samba restart mkdir -p /home/rubyc useradd -d /home/rubyc -p XXXXXXXX rubyc smbpasswd -a rubyc XXXXXXXX adduser --quiet rubyc staff smbpasswd rubys XXXXXXXX adduser --quiet rubys staff
My hope is that six — or sixty — months from now, somebody will stumble across this page using Google (or whatever has replaced it by then) and find it useful.