Sharing printers without samba?

[Daniel Mons]

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David Ryder wrote:
> 
> Can Windows use Ubuntu computers and printers without samba? If so,
> please, how?

Printing - absolutely.  CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System - the default
printing engine installed with Ubuntu, MacOSX, and most UNIX/Linux
systems) uses IPP (Internet Print Protocol) to share printers.

Microsoft don't advertise it (for reasons I won't go into here), but
Windows XP can connect to IPP printers with ease.  You will need either
a local generic postscript driver (both Adobe and CUPS provide this), or
a driver specific to the printer.

There's a good guide here on how to do it:
http://www.howtoforge.com/ipp_based_print_server_cups_p3

Files - there are a nearly unlimited number of options here.  If you
want trivial drive mapping and UNC support, you will need Samba.  If you
just want to get data to and from a Linux machine, you can use FTP,
SFTP/SCP, WebDAV, rsync, and many, many more protocols and systems.

I like SCP, because it's easy and secure.  My preferred SCP client for
Windows is the sensibly-named WinSCP:
http://winscp.net/eng/index.php

SCP uses SSH, so setup requires nothing more than installing the
"openssh-server" package on your Ubuntu machine, and having a user
account on the machine.  From there, connect to your Linux machine via
WinSCP with your username and password, and you can browse and copy
files back and forth across a highly secured connection.  This is
particularly useful if you're copying files to and from remote web
servers.  Plain FTP should be avoided at all costs when dealing with
remote servers in insecure/unknown locations.

I am a huge supporter of encrypting all data whenever and where ever
possible by default (my work requires me to encrypt/secure everything I
touch), and SCP is a great way to do so without a difficult setup process.

- -Dan
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