Installing Network Printer on Linux

[richyip]

Hi,

I'm very new to Linux. Now my company is moving to Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1. All our existing network printers have to be attached to Linux from Netware. May I know how can I install network printer on Linux?

Thanks.

[cowanrl]

On Red Hat, you can use the GUI Printer Configuration tool to set up your printers if you have a GUI installed. If you don't have a GUI installed, then you should be able to use:

/usr/sbin/printconf-tui

It's a character version of the GUI print tool.

I usually set my printer up to to just be a Raw Print Queue. Don't install any driver on the Linux server. That way, the Linux server doesn't process the print job at all. It just receives it, queues it, then sends it to the printer when it is available.
Install the printer driver on the client machine, whether they are Windows or Linux clients.

To share the printer out to Windows clients, it's usually easiest to use Samba. All Windows clients and even most Linux clients can print to the Samba shared printer.
If all of your clients are Win NT or 2000 machines, they can print directly to a TCP/IP printer so you could avoid Samba in that case.

If you're not familiar with Samba, you can get the details on it at www.samba.org. If you do a search on this site on "samba", you'll find plenty of threads on setting up Samba. If all you want to do is share out the printers, it would be very easy to set up.