Chapter 10. Printing

This chapter tackles the topic of setting up printers for use with Samba. Aside from the "coolness factor" of seeing documents from Windows word processing and graphics applications appearing in the output tray of the Unix printer, this facility can greatly increase the usefulness of your Samba server. In many organizations, using a Unix system as the print server has led to happier system administrators and users alike, due to the reduced frequency of problems.

Samba allows client machines to share printers connected to the Samba host system, and Samba can also send Unix documents to printers shared by Windows systems. In this chapter, we discuss how to get printers configured to work in either direction.

We focus in this chapter on getting Samba to serve up printers that are already functioning on the Unix host. We include just a few basics about setting up printers on Unix. Good references for this topic include Network Printing , Essential System Administration , and Running Linux , all by O'Reilly and Associates.