[UbuntuDallas] Hooking up a shared Printer

[William Stephens]

On Fri, 2007-03-09 at 19:37 -0600, John Sullivan wrote:
> Hello to anyone who can help me.
>  
> I am trying to get computers in front of the third, fourth and fifth
> grade students at Hillside Academy which is a public school in
> Garland, Texas.  I received a donation from my company of 75 Dell GX-1
> computers which are Pentium 2 450 megahertz and Pentium III- 550
> Megahertz machines.  After putting in new hard drives we are loading
> Ubuntu 6.06.1.  So far so good.  But they would like to have a shared
> printer for 10 of the computers.  I am using a Linksys 16 port
> ethernet switch and have tried several brands of USB printer switches
> so the computers can see the printer.  None of them offer Linux
> support.  Can anyone help me?

Hi, 

I'm not really a networking specialist, but I've had good results
putting the printer on one computer then sharing it to the rest by
Samba. It's pretty simple setup with Swat a web based administrative
tool for Samba. Samba is also good because an alternate operating system
might pop up and is supported.

I'm not a networking guru and even less a security expert. In my uses of
Samba I just opened everything up because there was no risks of anyone
getting physical access of network and was not on the Internet. I'm not
sure what security risk a 5th grader is these days and am not sure what
the hassles of setting the security stuff would be. I'm sure there is
plenty of how-tos around.

Just something to think about,
William S.