Et Tu Printerus?

Printing under Ubuntu (under any flavor of Linux I'm sure) is not always as expected.  If its your local machine, with a directly attached printer, not that bad.  Like any other OS, you need to have the proper drivers, and luckily with the current state of driver development, many printers are supported.  Thought I think I would probably check for fully supported printers before purchasing my next one.

I have the Epson All In One printer NX-400, and as a printer it works just fine.  But, as a scanner, it is unrecognizable.  So also, is its faxing capabilities from the computer. Stand alone, it appears to be fine, also plugged into a Windows XP system it all appears to be fine.  But, hooked to my main system running Ubuntu 9.10, it has its sore spots.

First off the scanner portion is totally unrecognizable.  Trying several driver options, and settings, gets nothing to see.  Good thing I still have an old flatbed scanner that I use, and it works flawlessly.  All I really wanted from this NX-400 was a printer, so I am not totally upset about the scanner/fax.

So, all is happy in whooville?  Of course not.  As soon as I have the printer working, I get requests from everyone else in the family to be able to print to it.  Sigh.  So that's three Windows XP systems, and a Windows Vista system I need to get printer sharing out to from my Ubuntu workstation.  Maybe its time to deploy a home centered server solution (another day).

Some of this has been lost in a haze, and I'm a little bit reluctant to hear the cries and gnashing of teeth of our new printer going offline. (If I were to disable everything and start over verifying each step that actually worked)  From what I recall I took the first step of getting my printer working locally, and for that I assumed it needed to have the latest CUPS installed.  Fairly easy procedure under Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install cupsys cupsys-client

So now, right or wrong, I think I have the printer ready.  In order to configure my specific printer I have to start the Printer Configuration Tool which can be found under System ->; Administration ->; Printing.
Clicking the New Printer icon, you go through the simple dialog steps of configuring your printer, and if luck holds your printer is known by Ubuntu, and can be chosen from the pick list (If not, then a round of searching for apropos drivers will be needed, or buying a printer that is more linux compatable).  Anyway, I find my NX-400 in the list, and go to add, and Apply the changes.  (The install option in these dialogs is for installing a driver from a download, or external media.  but, most modern printers are already available and this step is typically not needed)  So, now I have a local printer, it shows as "Ready" in the Printers display, and all looks good.

Now to make my workstation serve out this printer as a sharable resource. Going back to the Printer Configuration dialog window, then on the menu bar selecting server and then settings to open up the basic server sharing configurations.


Since this is my workstation, and not a dedicated server, I decided to choose the two options Show printers shared by other systems and Publish shared printers connected to this system and then under the printer properties page I made sure the option Shared was set and click Apply.

On each of the Windows computers in the house network I ran through the following simple setup.

1. Control Panel -> Printers -> Add Printer
2. Use the Add Printer Wizard
3. Add a network printer
4. Choose connect to printer on the internet and type in the following format http://PRINTSERVERNAME:631/printers/PRINTERNAME (where the printservername is the IPaddress or DNS name for my Ubuntu workstation sharing out the printer and the printername is the name of printer being shared)
5. On the next screen choose the correct driver for this printer.  (In my case, Windows did NOT know what driver to use and I had to go download it from the Epson site, and come back to this step)
6. Print Test page

Interesting point here, is that all the printing worked until the Ubuntu system got rebooted, then no printing worked at all.  I verified the sharing options, and all previously installed components, and even checked to see if the CUPS daemon was running.  And, I even verified that my workstation reboot just didn't give me a new IPaddress from DHCP.  Yet it wouldn't print.

The fix in this case was to install Samba

Installing samba was nothing more than installing the following through the synaptic manager, and then modifying the conf file to allow for printer sharing.

System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager    And then enter in samba for the search term and apply to install.

So once complete, open the /etc/samba/smb.conf and look for the section  on printers:

sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf

[printers]
   comment = All Printers
   browseable = no
   path = /var/spool/samba
   printable = yes
   guest ok = yes
   read only = yes
   create mask = 0700

# Windows clients look for this share name as a source of downloadable
# printer drivers
[print$]
   comment = Printer Drivers
   path = /var/lib/samba/printers
   browseable = yes
   read only = yes
   guest ok = no

And then restart samba

sudo /etc/init.d/samba reload

From here the Windows workstation is able to see the printers again, and has not had any problems losing configurations.

The whole ordeal to get the CUPS system working with a Windows client is weird and yet satisfying once its working.


Installing CUPS on Ubuntu
Installing SAMBA on Ubuntu