Network Printer Problem

[Craig White]

On Sat, 2011-10-22 at 07:14 -0500, Joe Bissett wrote:
> I have been trying to add my Ubuntu machine to my MSHOME network, and 
> finally after installing 11.10, my machine magically appeared on the 
> network.  Networking works well, except for my shared Brother HL-1440 
> laser printer.
> 
> The printer is connected directly to a W98 machine (name=joe), and I am 
> able to print without problems from it, or the XP machine.  The Ubuntu 
> machine does not yet see the printer.
> 
> I go to the printer set up screen, select "Network Printer", and try 
> "Find Network Printer".  I have been unsuccessful entering MSHOME or the 
> digital IP address of the router or the W98 machine to which the printer 
> is attached.
> 
> I then go to "Windows Printer via SAMBA" and enter mshome/joe/brother 
> and click "Browse"
> 
> The small "SMB Browser" screen appears, and after searching, if displays 
> "joe", indicating it has found the connection to the W98 machine.  The 
> "OK" button remains greyed out.  Clicking "Refresh" does not produce a 
> different result.
> 
> I am a total ubuntu command line novice, and like the way 11.10 seems to 
> have made ubuntu more friendly to newbies like me.  I'm "guessing" that 
> I am missing something simple in this intuitive set up dialog.
> 
> What am I missing?
----
First... you are missing the standard courtesy of starting your own
thread rather than choosing the reply to another thread and changing the
subject. Many of us actually use threading and this pollutes the
original thread and generally confuses things.

Second... on your Windows 98 machine, you have to 'share' the printer.
Make the name reasonably simple and it should be reasonably simple to
find it and print to it. With Windows, the naming is \\COMPUTER\SHARE
and Linux will use //COMPUTER/SHARE so if the Windows 98 computer is
called win98 and the shared printer is called HL1440, you should be able
to use //win98/hl1440 on your Linux box and not even have to bother
browsing (though browsing the network should work - there may be other
things that interfere with network browsing).

Craig



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