printer setup

[agar]

have an epson stylus 440 and an epson LQ 300 hooked upto a redhat machine with nothing but printer support, samba and webmin on it. Does redhat have a printerconfig thing for the cli? I tried to setup the printers through webmin but they don't have drivers for my printers in it. When I had kde installed on this system I could install the printers through the printconf gui.

[pbharris]

what does printtool give ya?

[andrzej]

If you just want to give other computers access to printers via samba and if you don't care about printing from the server itself, then you don't need any drivers except for the parallel port. Configuration is done in 2 steps:
1. edit /etc/printcap (syntax ? Google and pbharris are your friends)
2. edit smb.conf, add a line load printers = yes and add a [printers] share (as described in man smb.conf).

Should you have any problems I'll try to answer.

[agar]

Would the parelle ports not already be installed. Ones built in and the other is on an isa card. Both show up in the webmin config to add a printer. Also if I don't install the printers on the servers end how do I setup the printer from a windows machine. Simply install the driver and tell it the printer is at //servers name/whateverprinter? oh and what do I edit in /etc/printcap

[andrzej]

Remeber: you must have parallel printer support compiled into the kernel (default is not set, but most distros have it enabled, Debian is an exception).

Simply install the driver and tell it the printer is at //servers name/whateverprinter?

Exactly !
Well almost exactly: the syntax is \\servername\printername

oh and what do I edit in /etc/printcap

Darn. Could you possibly at least try to do something yourself ? :

Example config for my Xerox printer. lp and xerox are just aliases for it.
(sh - suppress header, sf - suppress footer, sd = spool dir (lpd is my spooler), maximum job size - unlimited, printer port - lp1).

lp|xerox:\
      :sh:\
      :sf:\
      :sd=/var/spool/lpd:\
      :mx#0:\
      :lp=/dev/lp1:\

[agar]

Ya when going back and forth from windows and linux I get the slashes wrong sometimes