Instructions for printing from Mac OS X to Win SAMBA printer

[Toby Allen]

This worked like a charm in my office.

Intructions

Mac running 10.2, PC running Win 98 - XP home,
connected through a dumb ethernet hub (connection
doesn't matter). Printer (HP laserjet 1100 - in my
case a BROTHER HL 1240 Laser) is parallel connected to
the XP box on LPT1 (default). Oh, and networking must
be working between the mac and PC. 

On the PC, just make sure the printer is shared (give
it a sharing name, you will need this info later). 

On the Mac, it's a little more involved but not bad
(requires using terminal window and be logged in as
root - dangerous if you don't know what this means).
The problem with this version of Jaguar is that smb
printing (what you need to do to get to the printer on
the PC) is not enabled in CUPS (Unix printing
services). So, you just need to enable it. (My note
here: you need to ENABLE the root login, if it's not
already logged in. I'm not going to explain that here
though. You can find that info int he APple
knowledgebase) 

Once again, when logged in as ROOT you can cause all
sorts of damage if you don't know what you're doing so
BE CAREFUL or get some help!!! 

Open a terminal window on the Mac and type su (you
will get a password prompt here, type it in) 

If you now get a prompt that ends with a # sign, you
are root. 

Now we have to add a link in CUPS to allow it to use
the smbspooler (which will allow it to send print jobs
to the pc printer). 

type: 
ln -s /usr/bin/smbspool /usr/libexec/cups/backend/smb
and hit return. 

enter it JUST like you see it above. You can copy it
if you prefer, paste command does work in the terminal
mode. Even the spaces are important in UNIX world. 

we need to stop and start the cups deamon now to make
it read the new info we just put into it. You can
restart your machine to do this or just kill and
restart /usr/sbin/cupsd. Just restart your machine if
you are unfamiliar with killing processes in Unix. 

Now we need to add the printer to cups. To do this,
open your browser and go to http://127.0.0.1:631 (this
is the cups admin interface, running on the Mac). 

in the top menu bar of the page that comes up, select
printers, then click add printer on the page that
comes up. A new page will come up with three fields in
it. You now need to put in a name for that printer (no
spaces). This is the name that will show up on your
mac when you print to that printer. The other two
fields are optional. 

Click continue and you will be asked to select a
DEVICE (I call it a service) to use to print with.
Choose "Windows Printer via SAMBA" from the pull down
window. This is the new capability we enabled in cups
above. 

There will now be a screen where you have to enter the
DEVICE URI of that printer. This is the last step. 

On the screen, a field should be there with "smb" in
it. Put the following info on that line: 

smb://<your short name on the mac>:<your password on
the mac>@<your pc workgroup name>/<name of the XP
machine>/<shared name of the printer on the XP
machine>. 

So my smb URI looks like this: 
smb://emg:<my pw>@workgroup/dell/BROTHER 

BTW you can also enter a new printer in the print
center if you hold down the option key while clicking
add printer. This brings up an additional "Advanced"
option in the add printer drop down list. From there
you can choose "Windows printer via samba" as well. 




=====
<-: TOBY ALLEN :->

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not 
certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. 
-- Albert Einstein"

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