sharing printers whith mac os x ?

popey.marin

Registered
Hello

I'd like to know, before buying a printer, if mac os X is able to share it on a network.
If yes, is it necessary to enter the IP adresse of the computer that shares the printer (like you do to mount a share folder) each time you want to print?

Thank you for your responces
 
I'm not sure how it works yet with doing a USB printer share on X, or whether or not you can set up an OS X system as a print server, but, if you have a printer capable of ethernet connections (e.g., HP LJ 4050 NT, or anything HP with a JetDirect device), then simply setting up the printer and setting it as the default in print Center means you'll never have to type the IP or location again, unless, of course, you reinstall the system.

Anybody who knows about USB printer sharing under X, i'd be very interested to know if it works.
 
I just found out that USB Printer Sharing isn't available in Mac OS X yet. Perhaps in a future release. :)

I do hope that Apple integrates SMB to their network services. As much as I'm ok with buying a program like DAVE or Sharity, I'd rather have apps for free. After all, if Samba is Open Source, why can't Apple extend it to us? :)
 
Off the point slightly, but SAMBA enables your mac to be a server to the PC (SMB/CIFS) world, but it does NOT allow your mac to mount disks shared by PCs.

SAMBA is open source, and has been ported and packed for OSX it is very straight forward to install.
 
I don t know about SAMBA on OS X, but i have used samba on linux to mount drives that are shared by PCs. the samba package comes with server software, which lets you share your UNIX/linux drive to PCs, and client software, which lets you mount on your UNIX file structure any SMB shares on your network, including shares from PCs windows 98 etc....

i have used it with linux and solaris, and i look forward to trying it with OS X, but have not done so yet. so if the samba package that comes installed with OS X client doesn t let you mount SMB shares on your network, maybe doing your own custom install of samba will work? or using the command line utilities. the command for mounting is smbclient. nmblookup will find SMB shares that you can mount

 
The problem is that the SMB client tools that come with Samba don't work with OS X. The person who is the primary developer the Samba Server Config Tool on Mac OS X was working on a client, until Apple announced their own client. So the only working methods (right now) are Dave for 10.0.4 and the client that comes with 10.1.
 
Sorry, I forgot about Sharity. I tried it out for a while under the student license, but since I didn't (and still don't) know much about Windows networking I couldn't ever get it to work. But my main point was that the SMB client that comes with Samba does not work in OS X, as of the most recent stable version.
 
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