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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Sunday, April 20, 2003

Printing to a Windows shared printer from Mac OS X
Ever since I got my iBook back in mid-2001, I've been trying to figure out how to print to my HP LaserJet 5P, which is shared on my workgroup from my desktop computer, which runs Windows XP. Over the ensuing months, Apple has made it easier to work with Windows-based shares, thanks to its integrated Samba technologies, but printing just never seemed to work. Last week, when I installed Red Hat Linux 9, however, I noticed that printing to the XP-based printer worked flawlessly, the first time, and it got me thinking. If I can do this from Linux, it's gotta work from Mac OS X, as they both support CUPS printing now. And, it turns out, it does work, and I got Windows shared printing working today from the iMac. But man, is it ever difficult, and very reminiscent of the way accessing Windows shares used to (sort of) work under the original Mac OS X version. The problem is that I'm not sure exactly what I did to make it work, so I'll have to test this again using the iBook. But I believe it involved at least some of the following steps: 1) install UNIX printer services on XP. 2) Create a new printer share on Windows using LPR and not auto-detect LPT1. 3) Install some crazy Ghostscript and EPS software on Mac OS X. 4) Make sure Windows sharing is on, and that you're on the right workgroup (which, inexplicably, requires two completely different applications in OS X; typical). 5) Use the correct LPR over IP connection to connect to the new share. 6) Print. Or something like that. I'm going to test this soon and see if I can't do a better job of documenting this, but here are the resources I used to get it to work. Note that none of these, by itself, actually worked, but that a combination of these resources caused me to finally get printing working.

1. How to Print to Windows via SAMBA and CUPS
2. Printing to Windows from MAC OSX 10.2 (Jaguar) using CUPS and SAMBA
3. How to Use a Printer Attached to a Windows XP Computer in Mac OS X

And if you're trying this at home, good luck!

[ Posted at 3:00 PM | Permalink ]