Windows clients of CUPS - newbie question

[Michael Sweet]

John A. Murdie wrote:
> Can someone point me to an introductory document about having Windows
> XP clients of CUPS (with a CUPS server on Unix, actually Solaris).
> One rather nice thing about Unix/Linux clients of a CUPS print server
> - which clients themselves run CUPS schedulers - is that one need not
> configure the printers on each client (which fact is very familiar to
> CUPS users). I'm not a Windows administrator, but there are some
> Windows XP desktops here, and it would be nice to have them
> auto-configure printers just as our Linux desktops now do.

Unfortunately, the printers aren't automatically discovered on
Windows, and the Windows printing system is simply not designed
to dynamically manage lists of (networked/shared) printers for you.

> Can this be done without Samba? I suppose that the problem here is
> having Windows printer drivers provided automatically to the
> desktops. With Samba - which we do run here - is there a Samba
> component or configuration which can be used to transfer print
> requests from Windows clients to the CUPS print server?

You can configure printers without Samba, using IPP.  The ESP Print
Pro Windows client is one implementation of this:

     http://www.easysw.com/printpro/software.php

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Publishing Software        http://www.easysw.com