Printing modal with Win-98

Mike Tubby (Samba List) samba at post.thorcom.com
Fri Mar 5 14:22:29 GMT 1999


All,

We use a RedHat Linux 5.2 machine with Samba-1.9.18p10 and have
recently upgraded our Windows-95 machine to Windows-98.

Under Windows-95 programs could print to network printers (served
by Samba) fine and queueing/spooling appeared to work fine.

Our server machine provides all the main file sharing facilities in the
offcice and also provides printing services for four printers - these
printers are run by lpd as remote printers and are a mixture of units
connected via Dlink-DE960 print servers and a HP-Laserjet-4 with a
network printer card.

Since installing Win-98 programs/applications (or the Win-98 O/S)
appear to treat the printing services differently - programs appear to
become 'application modal' while printing pages, MS Explorer 4.0
reports an error "you need to install a printer before printing" if you
try to print to a sabma/network printer while another application (on
the same machine) is printing or while another machine is printing
on the same printer.

Assuming that nothing has changed in Samba does anyone have an
idea why Windows network printing has taken such an aparrent step
backwards?

Printing directly from Linux command line, eg. "lpr -h filename" works
just fine and queues/spools things normally. The problem appears to
be in the way in which Win-98 interacts with Samba and determins its
ability to be able to print.

Can this problem be fixed through configuration changes on the Win-98
workstations or the Samba server?


Mike Tubby




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