Ubuntu – Windows 7 can’t find CUPS printer shared from Ubuntu

printingsharingwindows

I have Ubuntu 11.10 on one computer and Windows 7 on another. The Ubuntu computer has a printer attached, and I want to add this printer to the Windows 7 computer. Printing locally works. The problem is that Windows is not able to see the shared printer, so I cannot add it.

I am guessing that some Ubuntu setting / software is still missing, but what exactly?
How can I make Windows add this printer?

In the CUPS web front-end, the checkbox Share printers connected to this system is checked. I'm not sure whether the checkbox Allow printing from the Internet needs to be checked also; I've tried both settings, and neither worked.
On Windows, I can connect to the CUPS web front-end and see the printer listed (see screenshot below). And yet, when I add that printer URL, Windows complains that it cannot connect to the printer.
The Ubuntu computer is a fresh install. I already have full write access on Windows shares, so something of this kind must be preconfigured out-of-the-box. I have not installed or changed any applications or settings regarding Samba or smb.conf. Do I need to do anything in this regard (on Ubuntu 11.10!) or is that obsolete or already included and fully configured?
Googling for this problem gives me plenty of material dated 2005-2009 but nothing newer. I don't think that's still valid in 2012 and I don't want to mess up my new installation with outdated instructions. Via one of the comments I came to this page about network printing from Windows but it does not specify whether Samba is already installed — or which Samba to install, because searching in the Ubuntu Software Center yields several results.

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Best Answer

Well, I finally got it working. It turns out there are several parts that need to work together (of course). But here's a way that requires zero work in terminal:

1) Setup Samba:

Install "system-config-samba".
Launch "Samba" from the launcher.
Open "Preferences" > "Server Settings" and enter the workgroup name used in Windows.

2) Share printer:

Go to http://localhost:631/admin/ and check the box "Share printers connected to this system".
Go to http://localhost:631/printers/ and check that the expected printer is listed.
Click the printer and check that it is listed as "Idle, Accepting Jobs, Shared, Server Default".

3) Connect the printer:

Do either of these steps:

On the Windows computer, open Windows Explorer and go to the "Network" item. There's an icon for the Ubuntu computer; open it. There's an icon for the printer shared from Ubuntu. Right-click that one and select "Connect...".
On the Windows computer, select "Add new printer" then "Connect to a printer on the Internet or network" and specify the full path of "http://{computername}:631/printers/{printername}"

Then go to the printer properties and set it up with the desired defaults.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Sharing Printer with CUPS

Do you have a GUI desktop environment installed? You should be able to run /usr/share/system-config-printer/system-config-printer.py and enable sharing connected printers, then on other computers enable show shared printers.

Ubuntu – Configuring Samba to allow Use of CUPS printer

If your not too attached to using Samba you can share a printer using IPP:

The preferred way to connect a Windows client to a Linux print server is using IPP. It's a standard printer protocol based on HTTP, allowing you all ways to profit from port forwarding, tunneling etc. The configuration is very easy and this way is less error-prone than using Samba. IPP is natively supported by Windows since Windows 2000. To configure the server side you need to enable browsing in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf, by adding the line "BrowesAllow all":
```
 Browsing On
 BrowseOrder allow,deny
 BrowseAllow @LOCAL
 BrowseAllow all
```
On the Windows computer, go to the printer control panel and choose to 'Add a New Printer'. Next, choose to give a URL. For the URL, type in the location of the printer: http://host_ip_address:631/printers/printer_name (where host_ip_address is the GNU/Linux server's IP address and printer_name is the name of the printer being connected to).

After this, install the native printer drivers for your printer on the Windows computer. If the CUPS server is set up to use its own printer drivers, then you can just select a generic postscript printer for the Windows client(e.g. 'HP Color LaserJet 8500 PS' or 'Xerox DocuTech 135 PS2'). Then test the print setup by printing a test page.

If you must use Samba to share, you could adding a write list to smb.conf:

[printers]
comment = All Printers
path = /var/spool/samba
browseable = yes
guest ok = no
printable = yes
create mode=0700
write list=@adm root <username>

All of the above info I found at this wiki, which has more info then what I included here. Hope that helps!

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Sharing Printer with CUPS

Ubuntu – Configuring Samba to allow Use of CUPS printer

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