Click on the Windows To UNIX Printing icon on the module's main page to bring up the printer options form.

From the UNIX print style menu, select the type of print system in use on your box. Unfortunately, practically every different flavor of UNIX has its own set of programs and configuration files for handling printers and print drivers, each of which must be treated differently by Samba. The options that you may want to select from are:

BSD The traditional UNIX print software, found on FreeBSD, NetBSD, and older Linux distributions.

SYSV The print system used on Solaris, UNIXWare, and a few other versions of UNIX.

HPUX The print system shipped with HP/UX.

AIX The print software that comes with AIX—IBM's version of UNIX.

CUPS The superior CUPS print system, which is included with many new Linux distributions.

LPRNG An improved version of the old BSD print system used on all Linux systems that do not run CUPS.

Most packages of Samba will have this option set correctly in the default configuration file. Chapter 22 “Printer Administration” explains in more detail what the differences between the various print systems are, and how to select the right one for your operating system.

Normally, Samba will find all the printers on your system and make them visible to clients when the special printers share exists. To disable this, change the Show all printers? field to No instead. The printers will still be accessible using an explicit \servernameprintername path.

When the Printcap file field is set to Default, Samba will get the list of printers available on your system from the standard /etc/printcap file. This is fine if you want them to all show up, but sometimes you want to hide printers from users. To do this, create a fake printers file that looks like:


Set this field to the path for this file. Only the printers listed in it will be available automatically when a printers share exists.

Samba caches the output from whatever command is used to list waiting print jobs (such as lpq) in order to reduce the frequency with which it is run. By default, this cache time is 10 seconds, but you can increase or decrease it using the Printer status cache time field. If your lpq command is very slow, you may want to increase it.

Hit the Save button to activate your new printing settings.