samba printer

Yesterday, I decided to connect a printer to my computer via my local network. The printer is on the windows box so I had to use samba to connect. Fedora uses CUPs print services and has a configuration utility. No mater what I did, I could not get it to work - I kept getting error messages from the windows box. I could see the printer share via smbclient and smbtree, so I knew that the network was seeing the printer and therefore it was something wrong with my setup.

Softpro bookstore just happend to be having a 30% off sale on books and I got the latest edition of the FEDORA Core 2 BIBLE, and in it it showed me how to get to the CUPS administration function. I did this, and found after some experimenting and reading the help documentation that I needed to name my printer, within Linux, as smb://workgroup/server/share. When I did this, the whole thing worked well.

Connecting to network printers is not an entry level task, but still this was harder than it needed to be. THis is one of the problems with Linux at this time - there is not enough, easy to find and understand, documentation.