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You are here: MacNN Forums > Our Archives > General Archives > Servers > OSX Printer Sharing to Linux / Solaris Boxes

 
OSX Printer Sharing to Linux / Solaris Boxes
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Join Date: Dec 2000
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Jan 16, 2003, 10:18 PM
 
I have some USB printers hooked up to an OSX box, and I plan on getting OSX server on it.
Can I share those printers to linux (debian) and solaris boxes?
If yes, what is involved?
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Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Jan 19, 2003, 03:27 PM
 
I've looked into this a few times - It depends on the kind of USB printer you have. OS X Server only supports making queues for PS-compatible usb and laser printers.

However, I've had success with sharing usb printers through CUPS if the client computers have printer drivers for the printers already by serving the printer via CUPs and having the clients send data to the URL. However, that presupposes having drivers on the client that lets you do that. There are many threads about how to do this on http://www.macosxhints.com

However, this isn't a great solution because 1) you don't really have queues on the printer, so things get a little dicey if more than one person tries to print and 2) there appears to be some problem with usb printer sharing under os X server (which may not impact this at all.)

Another approach I tried but could get working (probably because I didn't have enough time to experiment and maybe because the printer drivers didn't work real well) was install gimp-print. I think if you use gimp-print and it has a decent driver for your printer you can make this work. If I understand how gimp-print is supposed to work, it converts post-script input to whatever native format you printer takes. So setting up a queue for a usb printer should be something like:

Set up an lpr queue and print post script files from your client computers.

the lpr queue, sends ps files to the gimp-print driver which in turn prints to the usb printer attacher to your server.

I set this up by running the gimp-print installer and installing gimp-print and ESP ghostview (needed to convert post-script to anything else) from http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/
And I set up a queue using the print server configuration program with OS X server 10.2.3.

I sort of had this working on my server, in that files coming into the server would queue, but the second part of this process never really worked - it appeared the print-driver just froze up. I never determined if that was the fault of the gimp-print driver for my printer, or a problem with how Apple configured lpd and cupsd.

Perhaps it would be possible to set this up manually rather than relying on apple's dodgy proven-to-not-work-very-well printer configuration utilities. At the time, I didn't pursue this because it wasn't a high priority for me and I'm not a whiz at configuring lpd, and cupsd (the two services relevant for serving to other unix machines... I guess if you wanted to include windows machines, you would also have to have this working with smbd, as well.)
     
 
   
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