Robert McBroom: >> Back to the original question of accessing a printer on a windows >> share. Oops, I hadn't noticed that the printer question I responded to wasn't the origin of the thread. I tried looking up that printer on the HP support website and the manual is very basic. Their old sales advert for says that it only has USB or WiFi connectivity. Nothing I saw said whether it could use both. As Ed said, using WiFi instead, for everything, may be the easiest solution. The printer has an embedded webserver, so it's a standalone network printer, if you want to use it that way. Trying to use a printer across a network share (where a PC is a host for the printer) gives you two options to begin with, whether that be CUPs or SMB used for networking: 1. Each computer has a local driver and sends the kind of data the printer wants over the network. 2. Each computer sends a common printing language over the network, and a print server acts as a driver to convert it to the language the printer wants. It's years since I tried Windows networking (between Windows and between Linux), and there were some peculiarities about how it tried to support the first method (supposedly the printer share could supply the driver to the other side, but that'd be some Windows magic between Windows computers). And to stop tearing your hair out, people usually manually installed the right driver on each client PC (the automatic thing would only work on the specifically supported OSs). I always went the other way: Shared the printer from a Linux computer running CUPS, and let the Windows machine access an IPP printer. That worked reasonably well. Then later, got a networked printer, and was always able to directly access it from each computer. That was easier than trying to use one PC as the gateway, driving the printer, and all other PCs sending print data to the gateway. Since the printer claims to use HP PCL3, I would think it not impossible for each computer to be able directly access it. HP PCL data is a bit like PostScript in that many things know how to deal with it. To do it the way you stated in your first post, you'd have to configure the PC directly connected to the printer. If you can't set up a user- account on the PC with credentials you want to use with the remote users, you'd have to make its printer share accessible by all (I don't know if you can still do that on Windows). I think that with taking that approach, you're in the context of solving how do you configure Windows, rather than what do you do on Linux. It's possible that you can have Windows share it as an IPP printer, that may bypass SMB nightmares. Can you plug the printer directly into Linux and print from it? As a test, to see that you can do it? And is that a viable way to always use the printer with your systems? NB: I don't have a Windows PC to do tests on to offer any direct help. -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1160.62.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Apr 5 16:57:59 UTC 2022 x86_64 Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list. _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
