Linux Server Hacks, Volume Two

Hack #26. Integrate Windows Printing with CUPS

CUPS is not just a great solution for Linux and Unix printing—it can also easily handle your Windows printing needs.

As we all know, it's important to be able to play nicely with Windows systems in today's academic and business environments. This may be philosophically unattractive to many of us, but it's a reality. While printing from Windows systems to Linux print servers is often done using Samba (leveraging the standard SMB/CIFS networking protocols), you may not want to set up Samba on every desktop for which you're responsible. Luckily, Microsoft's quest for proprietary standards hasn't eliminated their support for remote printing using other standard protocols, such as HTTP, which CUPS is happy to support. This hack explains how to configure Windows systems to print to remote CUPS print servers using the standard HTTP protocol.

Configuring Printing from Windows 2000/XP Systems

It's really quite easy to configure a Windows 2000 or XP system to print to a remote CUPS printer. First, select the standard "Add printer" icon from the Printers folder in the Control Panel. Specify that you want to create a remote printer, and enter a URL of the following form: http://name-or-address:631/printers/printer-name (as shown in Figure 3-11, which shows the Windows 2000 printer configuration dialog).

Figure 3-11. Specifying a URL in the Windows ...