Not that anyone cares, but I finally got printing working in linux! w00p! I had some serious trouble with this, trust me. I’ll post some of the details in hopes it will help others.
My setup is a laptop running
Gentoo linux. I am connected to a router which provides the life-flow known as the
Internet to my laptop and a desktop pc. There is a printer connected to the desktop pc, and that’s what I want to print to. The desktop runs Windows XP. What I needed setup and running is this: CUPS (Common Unix Printing Structure), SAMBA suite, netbios on windows computer, and the printer being shared from within windows.
At first, I was able to print using
smbclient to log in to the printer share and then use the SAMBA
print command. However, this was very hackish, to say the least. It took me a long time to track it down, but I was finally able to print with the command
smbspool. This is important bedcause this is what CUPS uses for the samba backend, and when you get the syntax for smbspool correct, you’ll be better off when it comes to debugging, later… if you have to.
smbspool {printerURI} {job} {user} {title} {copies} {options} [filename]
mine looked like this:
smbspool smb://desktop-workgroup/desktop-netbios-name/shared-printer-name jobname guest jobtitle 1 “” test.txt
To get a list of available shares (including printers), use
smbclient -L desktop-netbios-name -N. “desktop-netbios-name” with the name of your windows computer. So, if my windows computer was named “bob” and bob’s printer was shared as “pbob”, then the path to the printer would be “smb://bob/pbob”. I have my workgroup on my
/etc/smb.conf file set to the same as my desktop for simplicity. You can grab a
simple smb.conf file here.
CUPS
You may also have to make some changes to files in the
/etc/cups/ directory. But if you’ve got CUPS installed and running, you can manage it through a web application which will be running on your computer!
http://localhost:631/ This is the most significant part of the setup that I seemed to miss. Use this interface to add a SAMBA printer, and it should take care of all the nasties. You’re not done, yet. IMPORTANT: Once you’ve added the printer(s), you must
enable them and tell them to
accept jobs!
After you’ve done all your changes, you will want to restart SAMBA and CUPS.
/etc/init.d/samba restart && /etc/init.d/cupsd restart
Load up an application and you should see your new printer selectable! yay! (I hope I didn’t miss anything too important….)
It was almost like old times… except we had more space… and we weren’t in Japan. 
Temaki zushi and miso soup! Everything was delicious! Now, I must acquire katsuo dashi for my own miso purposes. Mmm…. And Ben, that gin and tonic was awesome.
I got to the top of the mountain around 4:45pm. 2 hours up. Other bikers passed me, but they were either in a car or biking machines! 
At the top I snapped a couple of photos of the naked mountain and unsuccessfully searched for clean water. The way down was obviously much quicker. I was back home hydrating myself by 5:45pm! 
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