Windows clients of CUPS - newbie question

John A. Murdie john at cs.york.ac.uk
Tue Sep 26 05:55:08 PDT 2006


> 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

I have managed to get (Windows XP desktop -> CUPS server on Solaris) printing working, as I say - but in my limited experience so far I've not seen the Windows printer queue window say anything other than:

"http://printserver:631 failed to open, retrying"

i.e. no queued jobs are listed.

Is this a known problem? Recall my other recent posting here about the CUPS Unix shell commands lpq(1) and lpstat(1) displaying anything queued - is this a related problem?

John A. Murdie





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