David Blamire-Brown wrote:
Hi,
This is a question about a small home network set-up for printing. I can't tell
if this is OT for this list, but that doesn't seem to be a firm restriction in
this part of the world in any case!
I have a locally attached printer on a Gentoo machine. I have a Windows XP
laptop. I would like to print from my XP laptop over the network to the printer.
I have followed the guide on gentoo.org. I've sort of got printing working via
Samba, but haven't been able to configure it for XP users to print without
having to login to Samba. So I'm looking back at using IPP on the XP laptop.
Anyway, the main question is, is Samba a preferred option, or is it just more
complicated than using IPP? There are a couple of brief lines about printing
via IPP in the Gentoo Printing Guide, but a whole separate guide on using
Samba. I can't find any information on use of IPP vs Samba via a brief Google,
but maybe I'm just not searching very well.
I would think Samba would be more an option for when you already have a
Windows/Samba domain running for the network that everyone authenticates
through. Granted, as another poster provided, you can enable
public/guest access, which would make it like a Win9x/Me printer share
though XP should do fine with it.
However, I think CUPS/IPP would be a better option. It's very easy to
configure (I just followed the Gentoo guide for it). And it makes it
very easy to install on any Windows system. If you have CUPS configured
properly, you can even have it provide the drivers automatically to the
Windows systems - I haven't tried that yet. It really impressed me how
quick and easy it was to install CUPS - both on other Linux systems and
on Windows.
There is a Samba/CUPS guide, so I think you can even mix the two a bit.
There is also one other issue to consider - AFAIK, the SMB protocol does
not do spooling - so you could get job conflicts, while IPP makes the
printer a true network printer running via a print server (e.g. CUPS) so
it has spooling inherent to it. (Someone please correct me if I am wrong
on this.) So you'll be safer using IPP. I have worked in environments
where printers were shared similarly - no print server - and it causes
problems when two people try to print something at near the same time;
the printer will ignore one job, or switch jobs in the middle - never
predictable what it would do, though I think ignoring jobs was what
primarily happened. It's a pain - and that's even with printers that had
built in network interfaces.
Just something to consider.
Ben
--
gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
