Printing to a Windoze Printer with Cups, Voodoo Magic

.. . where “8TRACK0” is my domain, “Nori Heikkinen” is my username, and “mypassword” is my password (not really, ha ha). You can call this ﬁle what- ever you want to, and put it wherever you want. I called mine .smbmount-ned and put it in my homedir; it really doesn’t matter.

Now that you’ve got that ﬁle, you can use it to mount the share:

mount -t smbfs -o credentials=/home/nori/.smbmount-ned //sambashare /mountpoint

Once this works and you have the share mounted, you can then stick a sim- ilar line in your /etc/fstab, and it will be mounted automatically every time you boot up. My line looks like this:

//8track/NED

/8track/ned

smbfs credentials=/home/nori/.smbmount-ned,rw

2.3.3Voodoo Magic

On the third install, I ran into problems mounting the samba share. I had done everything exactly as before, so I was miﬀed. I was getting the error:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on //8track/NED, or too many mounted file systems

In the end, I realized I didn’t have smbclient, which is in the smbfs pack- age. Again with the voodoo — I just did a

apt-get update

apt-get install --reinstall smbfs

and all was well. Weird.

2.4Printing to a Windoze Printer with CUPS

This part was surprisingly easy once I had samba running. I was prepared to start grokking the printcap system, and printer daemons and the like — when in fact, all I needed to do was apt-get install cups and all its peripherals:

apt-get install cupsys cupsys-bsd cupsys-client foomatic-bin gs-esp a2ps

(These are just all the things you might have installed in Section 2.1, minus the samba packages themselves.)

CUPS then has a lovely little interface for you through your browser.