Problems with Samba shared printers on two WinXP boxes - Mandriva LE2006

[John Van Ostrand]

On Sun, 2006-06-04 at 10:05 -0400, Clive DaSilva wrote:
> I have a small network with a Mandriva LE2006 box sharing files and 
> printers with two WinXP boxes using Samba. The XP boxes can see and use 
> the files and the Lexmark z22 usb printer attached to the Linux box. The 
> Linux box can see and use the files on the two XP boxes and can see the 
> two printers attached to these boxes, but not use them. One is a HP 
> psc1300 printer and the other is a Lexmark z25. Everytime I try to print 
> a test page to one of these printers, I hear the printer print a 
> carriage return and that is it. I set the XP boxes to be able to accept 
> print requests from Unix boxes. I have been trying to sort this out for 
> a long time, doing a lot of research, posted the question on 
> Linuxquestions.org.
> 
> Any ideas would be appreciated

If the printer is reacting to the print job (you mentioned hearing a CR)
then the problem is the format of the print job arriving at the printer.
I'm not familiar with the printer, but the specs online say it supports
Linux and there are linux drivers for old Linux distros.

It is possible that Windows is sending a printer reset and that is the
movement that you hear.

I think this is key to your problem. When printing through a Windows PC
the print driver on Windows is not used, it assumes the print job is
already in a format suitable for the printer. This means that a suitable
print driver needs to be installed on the Linux system. The printer in
question sounds like an inexpensive version. These printers, especially
of that vintage, didn't support standard printer languages. They often
didn't support plain text, but required a print driver to produce a
bitmap suitable for the printer.

Try the print drivers provided by Lexmark. A lot of changes to print
spoolers has happened since then so there's a good chance that the
drivers will not work out of the box.

Another option is to try a similar print driver from the Linux distro.
My Fedora has a Z23 support.

I hope that helps.

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