Help Finding Macintosh-Connected Printer CUPS

Hi All;

I am trying to get printing going on my Acer Aspire One to printers attached to iMac computers on my home network.

I have a household network consisting of a brodband modem with a 4 port hub and wireless capability. To this hub is plugged in an os x 10.4.9 iMac with two printers attached to it. Also wired to the hub is another os x 10.5 mac, and a dual boot linux ubuntu windows xp machine. All of these computers automatically discover and share the two printers attached to the iMac using Apple's native CUPS support. The xp finds the printers through Bonjour which is apple's Cups program for Windows. Also connecting to this network wirelessly is another iBook and another xp computer. Both of these also automatically share the printers attached to the iMac using same techniques as the wired computers.

When I first powered up my AAO the wireless found the network and got online OK. After the updater ran the first time and downloaded 4 updates, I tried configuring a printer via the printer settings gui. I got a "CUPS printer error" error message in a dialogue box but behind this I noticed that the AAO had found and identified the two printers attached to the iMac. I cancelled out of the setup as there were not other options. At this point the AAO went into another update sequence and downloaded a larger bunch of uppdates. After installing these successfully and rebooting, I tried to configure the printer again. This time the AAO printer setup dialogue no longer gives me the CUPS error, but it no longer automatically "sees" the two printers at all. It only gives me the option to install a printer via Samba or IPP.

I do know that CUPs is installed and running on the AAO (using ps -e |grep cups on the terminal I get this: 2584 ? 00:00:00 cupsd)

Should I pursue trying this through ipp setup (finding the server name of the imac and the ip address of its printers?) or should I try to get CUPS working? Or??? Thanks very much for any help

 

Avahi is also installed on your Linpus computer, but isn't turned on. One would think that it should find your Bonjour network. I don't have Mac's nor have I tried this, so can't talk from experience. Maybe someone else using Avahi on Linpus can help you further?

sudo /etc/init.d/avahi-daemon start

... should turn on avahi. What one does after that, I have no idea.

Cheers.

 

Thanks for responding; I've started the avahi daemon. That is now running as a process. However I still do not see these printers in either the gui printer setup or in http://localhost:631/printers. Any ideal how avahi is connected to cups or to either of the above?

 

One quick suggestion---the cups that comes with Linpus is, unfortunately like many other parts of it, somewhat old and/or broken.

I would try the following.

sudo yum -y update fedora-release

It will ask to import some keys (and do so--the -y flag means answer yes to all questions) but this is fine.

Then
sudo yum -y update cups

I can't promise this will fix the problem, but I think it gives you a better chance of doing so.

 

Thanks Scottro:
Both the updates completed ok, however, AAO is still not auto discovering my printers but at least I know I'm dealing with an up-to-date CUPS subsystem.

 

Google is your friend:

http://blog.venthur.de/2007/08/17/h...r-windows-and-others-using-cups-and-zeroconf/

 

I've been making progress.

Edited 21:35:

When I access cups via localhost:631/printers I can now see the two printers I'm trying to print to. As the subject says: "Help Finding ....Printers"
So I will thank cpchan and scottro for their help and will start a new thread getting these "found" printers to print!!

Problem solved: Thanks to everyone

 

I have no explanation for something that happened this afternoon. I went to print a web page to file, and to my surprise, saw two printers that are hooked to my iMac. To my knowledge, I took no explicit actions on either the Acer or the Mac to make this happen. Later in the day, one of the printers disappeared, and still later, both disappeared. What could have caused them to appear as printer choices in the first place?

Any ideas on how to get them back?

 

I just rebooted the iMac, and both printers are now visible to the AAO. It's nice to have this work, but I wish I understood why it works. Printer sharing is turned on for the iMac, but I'm surprised that the AAO could find it without my making any effort.

 

I figured it out. RTFM. Once I defined a new printer on my wife's MacBook, I could access the shared printer through the iMac. I'm still surprised that the Linux box found shared printers without effort on my part.