Let’s take a look at just how quickly and easy you can share out your printers in GNOME.

Assumptions

I will assume you already have your printer working on the machine to share the printer out. In my example, the printer is connected via USB and is a Samsung ML-1720 laser printer. You might have to deal with a firewall, I will illustrate how this is handled later.

The sharing

Figure 1

The first thing you need to do is click System > Administration > Printing on the machine the printer is connected to. You will have to enter your sudo password to open up the tool. Once opened you should see a listing of your connected printers. Right-click the printer you want to share out and select Properties. In this  new window (see Figure 1) click on the Policies section and then make sure the following are checked:

1. Enabled

2. Shared

3. Accepting jobs

Figure 2

Once you have that set click OK. Now go back to the the Printer listing window and click Server > Settings. In this new window (see Figure 2) make sure that Publish shared pritners connected to this system is checked as well as any other options you might want to have enabled. Click OK when you are done with this.

Firewall

This, of course, will all depend upon what tool you use for your firewall. But what you need to do is to enable incoming connections from the machine(s) that need to print to the shared printer on port 631. If your firewall works with services and not ports, the service you want is IPP. if you seem to be having trouble getting the machine to connect to the shared printer you can first try to disable your firewall to test if the machine can then connect. If it can then you will need to adjust your firewall settings in order to get the remote machine connected to the printer.

Connecting

The biggest challenge might come with with the remote machines. If you are connecting from Linux, the connection will be simple. You just need to select Windows Printer via SAMBA when selecting the type of printer you want to add.

If you are having trouble connecting from either Windows or Mac, you might have to create users on the Linux machine that match the users on the Windows or Mac machine (in both username and password). If you still have trouble, you might have to adjust the authentication type within the smb.conf file. Hopefully it won’t come to that.

Final thoughts

Linux continues to prove it can play well on the average user desktop. Even with printer sharing, Linux has become a user-friendly OS.

Samer recently discovered the software Printer Share which advertises itself as the ultimate no-brainer remote printing solution. One advantage of Printer Share is that the development company provides clients for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. The only requirement is an Internet connection on both computers to send the date.

Speaking of which. The company that developed Printer Share mentioned on their website that all data is encrypted before it is send which might make this printer software interesting for smaller businesses with at least two separate offices.

Sharing a printer could not be much easier. Both clients download the Printer Share software from the Internet and install it on their computer. Each has to register an account which will assign a unique username to it. The setup will also create a virtual printer called PrinterShare. If the user wants to print a document remotely he would simply send the document to the virtual printer which in turn asks the user where he wants to print it providing there is more than one remote location that is sharing a printer.

Any printers that are connected to a system can be shared by the system’s owner. This is one mandatory step if the owner wants to share a printer with other users.

The service is offered as a paid and free service. The main difference is that a cover page is printed when using the free service which contains advertisement. This is not the case in the paid version which however costs $19.95 per month.

This software might appeal most to users and businesses who print papers on a daily basis. Users who have no need for a printer and print documents once or twice a month could as easily send the documents to the other computer owner per mail or use some other sort of file transfer and initiate the print job that way.