So you have a file server running Linux. You have a printer attached to your server and you want to share it with the rest of the machines on your network. If you're using Linux or Mac OS X on your client machines, the answer is easy: CUPS! But what if you have a couple of old Mac computers on your network and you need to share the printer with those machines too?
You only have one choice for sharing anything with an old Macintosh computer running a Classic Macintosh OS: Appletalk! And that means that you're going to have to use netatalk on your Linux server.
Setting up netatalk to share files and mounted volumes is quick easy and painless. There's very little you'll have to do by way of configuration. Setting netatalk up to share a printer with your old Macs is a bit more complicated.
I took a look at the netatalk man page and surfed the net a bit looking for answers. The simple and obvious solution was to use CUPS to publish the printers on the network. A single line in your papd.conf file and you should be good to go, right? Wrong!
Everything appears to work by publishing your network printers using CUPS, but appearances can be very deceiving. You click on your chooser, select Laserwriter, and your published CUPS printer pops up in your Chooser. Everything appears to be working until you actually attempt to print something. Classic Mac OS doesn't do IPP! Therefore you'll never actually communicate with CUPS or your printer from Classic Mac OS. It took me hours to realize this.
Finally, I gave up on the simple obvious CUPS route and decided to go with the old tried and true. In a last ditch effort, I went with piping through lpr. Eureka! There's gold in them there hills! It worked!
Moral of the story: If the simple and obvious solution doesn't work right off the bat, give up! Go with the slightly more complicated route and you'll succeed... And save yourself a whole lot of time!
You only have one choice for sharing anything with an old Macintosh computer running a Classic Macintosh OS: Appletalk! And that means that you're going to have to use netatalk on your Linux server.
Setting up netatalk to share files and mounted volumes is quick easy and painless. There's very little you'll have to do by way of configuration. Setting netatalk up to share a printer with your old Macs is a bit more complicated.
I took a look at the netatalk man page and surfed the net a bit looking for answers. The simple and obvious solution was to use CUPS to publish the printers on the network. A single line in your papd.conf file and you should be good to go, right? Wrong!
Everything appears to work by publishing your network printers using CUPS, but appearances can be very deceiving. You click on your chooser, select Laserwriter, and your published CUPS printer pops up in your Chooser. Everything appears to be working until you actually attempt to print something. Classic Mac OS doesn't do IPP! Therefore you'll never actually communicate with CUPS or your printer from Classic Mac OS. It took me hours to realize this.
Finally, I gave up on the simple obvious CUPS route and decided to go with the old tried and true. In a last ditch effort, I went with piping through lpr. Eureka! There's gold in them there hills! It worked!
Moral of the story: If the simple and obvious solution doesn't work right off the bat, give up! Go with the slightly more complicated route and you'll succeed... And save yourself a whole lot of time!