printing

[Tijben]

Note : This is not a patch report but an idea for development.
          Please forward to the relevant partie(s) if this is not the right place (In which case I am                   sorry to have bothered you)


Dear Samba people,

For printing I am using a router with Samba installed. Printing is from Windows 95 and 98 and Suse 7.2
with LPRng installed in Samba Printing mode.
On the router I have not installed any printer dirver but use the following print command in the Samba configuration file : cp %s /dev/lp0;rm %s
This is working great for me but some client printer programs have problems due to lacking status feedback (eg Cups)
Since people printing from windows are using "raw" input to Samba and in mixed environments also often on the Linux machines printing is set up to Samba (with filtering on the client) it would be a great idea to incorporate a Samba printing method  which can directly print to a selected port. Samba can give normal status feedback for this Samba printer.
The advantages are :
        Much simpler set-up for a lot of people
        Less file handling in moving files between the different spooling directories.
        Less resources to be installed on the machine

I hope that the Samba team will evaluate this idea

Bert Tijben