# Mac to Windows shared printer?



## Cube (Dec 3, 2002)

I finally got the Mac and Windows to play together nicely and share their files.  Unfortunately the PC's are being greedy and won't share the printer with Mac although they will with each other.

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Forgive the sarcasm.  Is there any way that I get the Mac to see a printer on the Windows network?  The printer is hooked up to one of the PC's and not the network hub, but the Windows PC's can see it and print to it as long as the machine connected to the printer is turned on.

Advice appreciated.


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## emgersh (Dec 4, 2002)

Hi, I just solved this problem for myself with the help of another forum that shall remain nameless. Here are the instructions I used with a few additional changes and notes from me:

Mac running 10.2, PC running Win 98 - XP home, connected through a dumb ethernet hub (connection doesn't matter). Printer (HP laserjet 1100 - in my case a BROTHER HL 1240 Laser) is parallel connected to the XP box on LPT1 (default). Oh, and networking must be working between the mac and PC.

On the PC, just make sure the printer is shared (give it a sharing name, you will need this info later). 

On the Mac, it's a little more involved but not bad (requires using terminal window and be logged in as root - dangerous if you don't know what this means). The problem with this version of Jaguar is that smb printing (what you need to do to get to the printer on the PC) is not enabled in CUPS (Unix printing services). So, you just need to enable it. (My note here: you need to ENABLE the root login, if it's not already logged in. I'm not going to explain that here though. You can find that info int he APple knowledgebase)

Once again, when logged in as ROOT you can cause all sorts of damage if you don't know what you're doing so BE CAREFUL or get some help!!!

Open a terminal window on the Mac and type su (you will get a password prompt here, type it in) 

If you now get a prompt that ends with a # sign, you are root. 

Now we have to add a link in CUPS to allow it to use the smbspooler (which will allow it to send print jobs to the pc printer). 

type: 
ln -s /usr/bin/smbspool /usr/libexec/cups/backend/smb and hit return. 

enter it JUST like you see it above. You can copy it if you prefer, paste command does work in the terminal mode. Even the spaces are important in UNIX world.

we need to stop and start the cups deamon now to make it read the new info we just put into it. You can restart your machine to do this or just kill and restart /usr/sbin/cupsd. Just restart your machine if you are unfamiliar with killing processes in Unix.

Now we need to add the printer to cups. To do this, open your browser and go to http://127.0.0.1:631 (this is the cups admin interface, running on the Mac). 

in the top menu bar of the page that comes up, select printers, then click add printer on the page that comes up. A new page will come up with three fields in it. You now need to put in a name for that printer (no spaces). This is the name that will show up on your mac when you print to that printer. The other two fields are optional. 

Click continue and you will be asked to select a DEVICE (I call it a service) to use to print with. Choose "Windows Printer via SAMBA" from the pull down window. This is the new capability we enabled in cups above. 

There will now be a screen where you have to enter the DEVICE URI of that printer. This is the last step. 

On the screen, a field should be there with "smb" in it. Put the following info on that line: 

smb://<your short name on the mac>:<your password on the mac>@<your pc workgroup name>/<name of the XP machine>/<shared name of the printer on the XP machine>. 

So my smb URI looks like this: 
smb://emg:<my pw>@workgroup/dell/BROTHER 

BTW you can also enter a new printer in the print center if you hold down the option key while clicking add printer. This brings up an additional "Advanced" option in the add printer drop down list. From there you can choose "Windows printer via samba" as well.

This worked great for me on an old Dell running Win 98. Now I want to get it working on my Cobalt qube 3 with SAMBA print sharing. Any ideas??? ;-)

Good luck!

BTW attribution to "Henry B" and "Pat" because it's only fair!


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## Cube (Dec 4, 2002)

Hi

Thanks for the detailed reply.  This ALMOST works.  When I print from the Mac, my PC's HD makes some noise, but then nothing is printed.  I think I need to sort out the drivers at the Mac end.

I'll keep messing with it!  Thanks again for the awesome and relevant post!


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## emgersh (Dec 4, 2002)

You're very welcome. I must admit, I've only tried this on my Powerbook and it worked perfectly. . . it's true that I do have the Brother driver installed on this machine but I don't think that's relevant with CUPS since it uses a different version of the driver.

I have also installed ghostprint and gimp print but this solution worked prior to that. Still, if you have an HP printer and haven't found the correct print driver for this so0lution you might try downloading and i9nstalling those programs. You can find the link from the CUPS info page. You have a link to that page from the CUPS interface on your Mac.

Good luck!


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## LogicMan (Apr 4, 2003)

hello,
well, this seems to work but my pc printer (HP DeskJet) is printing all garbage and going crazy...


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## chicodoggy (Apr 11, 2003)

Help!!! how do it print from my pc laptop to my epson usb attached to my mac running osx jaguar???  I have a linksys wireless network and cant seem to get them to network together.

HELP!

Thanks!


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