Printing to Windows XP printer from Ubuntu

Enable “Print Services for Unix” on Windows XP machine and share printer. (I’m not actually sure that this is necessary, it might be a red herring…)

When you add the printer in Ubuntu,

  1. Choose “Network Printer” and “Windows Printer (SMB)”
  2. put your Workgroup in the Host field
  3. Put “guest@<host>/<printer>” in the Printer field (replacing <host> and <printer> with your host & printer names)

So, for example, if your Windows machine was called “Dozer” and your printer was called “LaserPrinter”, you would put “guest@Dozer/LaserPrinter”.

You should not need a name and password for the Windows machine for this to work.

Note: please note that case-sensitivity is important.. e.g. If you think your machine name is “DOMINO”, it should be “Domino” in the config above.

Tags: , , , ,

53 Responses to “Printing to Windows XP printer from Ubuntu”

  1. Pari says:

    If it helps anybody, i used the ip address of my computer for the
    I was having a lot of problems with the verification. The guest account fixed that for me. Thanks!

  2. Pari says:

    whoops… i meant to say i used the ip address of my computer for the “host”

  3. [...] The tricky bit was finding the correct driver. The HL-2040 wasn’t listed in the printer selection dialogue, so I did a quick google to find a compatible printer driver. Got all the info I needed in a reply to a post on Rachel’s Knowledge Base [...]

Leave a Reply