Printer sharing worked?

[papaschtroumpf]

I did a clean install of Spring 2007, however I did keep my /home partition intact (with the exception ofa few things, like I blew my .kde away to make sure to start clean)

 

The system properly located and installed my local USB printer (Samsung 1710), which was nice but not unexpected. I may have checked a "share printers" checkbox somewhere during install.

 

One of the things I always leave for last is setting up Samba, because I always find it confusing.

Before I even got to setup samba, my wife was using her laptop (running WinXP), she hit Print, and low and behold, the document comes out of the printer attached to the linux machine!

Just like she expected, but not what *I* expected since I had not setup samba and printer sharing yet.

 

What happened? did I run into some bit of magic that caused CUPS to properly share the printer with windows machines with no input from me? Was there some leftover samba related settings from the previous install that was stored in the /home partition and threfore survived the install?

 

I'm happy at the result but worried I don't understand how it happened...

 

 

[moved from Software by spinynorman]

[pindakoe]

Samba does not really manage printers, but relies on CUPS. SAMBA provides some additional options/control over a CUPS printer server, but in principle you can equally well share a printer using CUPS only. You can look at your CUPS server setup via the mandriva control center, or edit /etc/cups/cupsd.conf (or one of the other configuration files insame directory for certain special cases). You can track progress of your server via your browser (http://127.0.0.1:631).