I finally figured out how to set up the local network in a way that allows the Mac, the XP box and Linux box to all print to our sad little HP 693C. The key problem has been the fact that Windows doesn’t want to share the printer with non-MS machines (surprise surprise). So, a couple of weeks ago I decided to hook it up to Sarah’s Mac as OS X has great printer sharing capabilities. But, apparently OS X cannot use the printer. HP will not provide a driver for it for OS X and the Mac won’t even select it as a generic printer. I was rather annoyed to say the least when I figured all of this out.
But this morning I realized that it is relatively trivial to add the printer to the fileserver (running Mandrake Linux 9.1). With a quick change to samba.conf (the Samba configuration file) and a restart of the process we were presented with a printer that works across platform lines.
It sure as hell took long enough!