Revision as of 21:38, 2 February 2009

Adding a USB Printer

You can easily add a USB printer to your core or to an MD to share over the network, even with windows PC's.

Installing the Printer on a pc

• Connect the USB printer to the pc (in my case I chose to connect to the core so the printer would be in my server closet).
• Using LMCE navigate to the KDE desktop.
• Navigate to System settings and select the "Printers" icon. This should bring up the Printer System Settings menu.
• Click on the dropdown for "Add", and select "Add Printer/Class". This will bring up the Add Printer Wizard, click "Next"

• you may experience a known bug with KDE here. Sometimes the radio button where you would select "Local printer(parallel,serial,USB)" will be unavailable/grayed out. If you know that your USB ports and Printer are both functioning properly try using this command from a terminal.

 cd /etc/cups
 sudo cp cupsd.conf.default cupsd.conf
 sudo /etc/init.d/cupsys restart

• Select the radio button for "Local Printer", then select your printer from the list.

• KDE has quite alot of printer drivers already available in the OS so you should be able to select your printer Brand and Model in the next screen.

• Once you do so it will bring up a list of possible drivers that you can select and test to see which one works best. Once you are done click "Finish".

You have now installed your USB printer to this PC.

Share Printer on Local Network

You can now share your newly installed printer with other PC's on your network.

• Navigate back to System Settings and select the "Printers" icon.
• Select the drop down for "Print Server", then select "Share Printers on Local Network". Click "Enable Sharing" on the popup.

Adding Shared printer to a Windows PC

Now that you have your printer installed and set to share on your network, you will need to show windows how to get to the printer. My windows laptop running Vista would not automatically locate this printer, so this is how I set it up.

• On your windows machine go to Start>Control Panel>Printers and Faxes.
• Select "add a printer"
• Click "Next"
• Select the radio dial for network printer and click "Next"
• Click the radio for "Connect to this Printer" and fill in the blank. You must make sure to add the port :631 after your server IP address.

• ex. \\192.168.80.1:631\printer\'what_you_named_your_printer . You will be asked for your LMCE password and it should connect to the printer. After that you will just have to tell windows what type of printer it is and specify the driver and you should be set.

Adding a shared printer to a MD/or Kubuntu based PC

• This is pretty straight forward using the KDE printer wizard, feel free to fill this section in, if not I will get to it later.