Sharing with a PC

[Veljo]

OK here's my situation. I currently have my iMac and PC next to each other with my HP DeskJet 810C in between them. The PC has a huge parallel port going into the printer and the Mac has a USB going into the printer: this is the only way I can get both computers to use it.

Now here's my dilemma:
This weekend I'm going to move my iMac upstairs into my bedroom and run a network cable downstairs to the PC. As I can't directly plug the iMac into the printer, how can I share this printer? I have the printer set up to be shared on my PC (Windows XP Professional) but how do I find it in Print Center? Will I have to use a USB port on the PC to get the Mac to recognise it or will the parallel port be OK?

 

[Zammy-Sam]

Originally posted by Veljo
I have the printer set up to be shared on my PC (Windows XP Professional) but how do I find it in Print Center?

Here an instruction that was posted some time ago in this forum:

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.


Good luck!