How Linux Works

Sharing Printers

You can export all of your printers to Windows clients with a special [printers] section in your smb.conf file. Here's how the section looks when you're using CUPS:

[printers]
  comment = Printers
  browseable = yes
  printing = CUPS
  path = cups
  printable = yes
  writable = no

To use the printing = CUPS parameter, your Samba installation must be configured and linked against the CUPS library.

As you learned in Chapter 12, there are several other printing systems in addition to CUPS. On Linux, you can set the printing parameter to BSD, LPRNG, PLP, or CUPS. Of these, CUPS is the easiest.

Note

Depending on your configuration, you may also want to allow guest access to your printers with the guest ok = yes option because you may not want to ...